When Captain Picard is ready to fly up from the surface of the Earth to the Enterprise, he just hops onto a shuttle and zips up into orbit. We've been bombarded with these images for so long, a lot of non-technical people might not fully appreciate just how hard it is to get into orbit with current technology. So, for the benefit of those who aren't technically inclined, this article presents a brief overview of why it is so difficult and expensive to get into space.

Tim Bray has been doing a series of late on technology success predictors, the latest of which is a list of factors which may be important, including investor support.

Asks Bray: "Is a heavy flow of investment dollars an important predictive success factor?"

Having spent a lot of years in and around the venture community and watching startups, I know that there are two things which can kill a nascent technology: not enough money, and too much money. Not enough money is obvious. Too much money seems counterintuitive, but is just as deadly.

Microsoft is floating an "iPod killer" which will pack audio and video playback into a Windows CE-based device costing $400 to $700. Units will be available in mid-2004, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say this product (at least as it is being shown currently) will land with a dull thud. In fact, I'm going to go even farther, and suggest that this will become an excellent case study of how good theories don't translate into good products.

Theory: To beat iPod, you have to do it better. It is pretty hard to refine the digital music player much beyond the iPod, which fits the niche almost perfectly. An excellent combination of storage capacity, form factor and experience (aka user interface), the only thing it needs is a lower price, and that's supposed to be coming. So how do you do iPod one better?

Why, add video, of course!

Bzzzzzzt! Wrong answer.

At the risk of sounding much older than I really am, I've been on the Internet since 1987. Writing about the Social Networking fad last night made me think about other fads which have come and gone over the years. A fad, in my mind, is an idea or technology which is briefly popular, but can't outlast its own novelty value. Once people get over the newness of it all, there isn't really anything special left.

Here, off the cuff, are the ten which stand out most in my mind:

We've seen it all before. Cool Technology In Search Of An Application.

Social Networking software and services, like Friendster and Tribenet , have been getting a lot of attention lately. These services allow their users to take advantage of the "six degrees" concept to expand their social and business circles. For example, you might not know Joe Smith, but you might know Mary Jones, who knows Joe Smith. This gives you a connection to Joe, and you can use that to make an introduction for business or social purposes.

It was hard to live through the dot-com bubble and not know about George Gilder, seer of the Internet Era. If there was anyone who personified both the hype and the disappointment, he was the one.

I stumbled across my first Gilder article back in 1994 or 1995, talking about the promise of optical networks and the "telecosm," as he described an always-connected high-speed world. As a graduate student struggling with relatively low-speed networks (back then, a T-1 was a big deal!), the vision was both compelling and made immediate sense.

Gilder's problem was not that he didn't have vision. He had plenty of vision. His problem was that, with his head in the clouds, he forgot that his feet still had to be on the ground. He was right about what the technology is capable of, but wrong about how long it would take to deploy and build viable businesses.

Some cable modem providers are starting to impose bandwidth caps on heavy users. There is a much better technological solution.

I won't deny that the problem is real. Heavy Internet use creates a burden on the network, and slows it down for everyone. And, if the usage patterns for cable modem subscribers are similar to other areas, a very small number of heavy users accounts for a large percentage of the total traffic. Getting 1% of the users to cut back could free up 10%, 20%, maybe even 50% of the network for everyone else.

The problem is that broadband ISP's market themselves as having "unlimited" usage, and they generally don't publish any particular amount of network use which is excessive.