384 HOW: Beyond Text/Pictures: Parting Sermon

Though Apple sells professional QuickTime suites, it also gives away some extremely capable video authoring tools with every new Mac. What is the sense in that? The sense in that is that these “free” products come with a Macintosh. If you want the free product, you buy the Macintosh computer. Similarly, Microsoft gives away WMF authoring tools to encourage you to buy Windows products. Some web businesses might have trouble coming up with revenue models, but software and computer companies generally don’t.

While striving to reach ubiquity, plug-in makers have frequently partnered with content producers. For instance, at different times, downloadable trailers at a well-known movie company’s empire of websites have been available exclusively in Apple’s QuickTime format, and at others, exclusively in Windows Media Player format. The plug-in maker compensated the movie studio for favoring its product over competitive plug-ins.

Today the cash flows in the opposite direction. A movie studio might pay the purveyor of a popular plug-in to feature its studio instead of a competitive film conglomerate on the plug-in vendor’s “Hot Downloads” page. Ubiquity makes for destinations, and destinations, if popular enough, can generate income. To up the income, the plug-in page sprouts ad banners— from free plug-ins to cold cash in twelve easy lessons.

As we feared, none of that was as interesting as Jennifer Lopez’s dress.

PARTING SERMON

In Chapter 2, we discussed the way most popular plug-ins stream their presentations to compensate for slow user dialup modem speeds. We also reminded you just how slow those dialup speeds really are. Please reread Chapter 2 before authoring high-bandwidth multimedia content or blithely adding it to a site for which it might be inappropriate.

We web designers, most of us, anyway, live in a spoiled world of hyper-fast Internet access, powerful desktop processors, and wide-screen monitors. Most of the world does not enjoy such niceties, or anything half so nice.

Taking Your Talent to the Web

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In fact, as the Web grows in popularity, the median average access speed declines drastically because there are more and more home users for every luxuriously appointed web professional. Though the field is expanding tenfold, the web-using population is growing at many times that pace. Even if the profession were to stop growing, the number of web users would continue to rise.

The day of universal high-speed access and fat bandwidth is not at hand.

It’s not even close.

While the prophets of high bandwidth high-five each other, millions in China and Africa and Alabama begin using the Web via a 14.4 modem that is shared by two or three families or 50 kids in a schoolroom. In libraries in America and around the world, those who cannot afford Internet access line up for hours to use public systems. Some of those systems are fast. Some are not. Few can afford to be tied up for hours just so some logo can spin.

Even those on the fortunate side of the digital divide rarely enjoy the fastest speeds or the most reliable connections. When the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart jokes about the AOL busy signal, the entire audience laughs. They’ve been there. Most of them still are there. They are not only Jon Stewart’s audience, they are every web designer’s audience. And they’re the ones in the good seats.

So treat rich media like you’d treat Jim Beam: responsibly.

We end this chapter on a somber note, but the book on a happy one. Kindly proceed to Chapter 13.