Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”
Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.
Andreessen once famously put the New York Times on deathwatch for its stubborn insistence on trying to save and prolong its legacy print business. With all the recent excitement in media quarters recently over Apple’s upcoming iPad and other tablet computers, and their potential to create a market for paid digital versions and subscriptions of newspapers and magazines, I wondered if Andreessen still felt the same way. Does he think the iPad will change anything?
Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”
But people pay for apps. Wouldn’t he pay for a beautiful touchscreen version of a magazine? Maybe, if it were something genuinely new that blew him away. It would have to be more than an article with video and graphics though. (I agree, otherwise it’s no better than a CD-ROM).
Oh, and he points out, that the iPad will have a “fantastic browser.” No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger market. “There are 2 billion people on the Web,” he says. “The iPad will be a huge success if it sells 5 million units.”
Despite trying time and again, Andreessen’s observation is that media companies have no aptitude for technology, nor do they really understand what technology companies do. The one thing technology companies do really well is deal with constant disruption. “Microsoft is going through this right now,” he points out, “Ballmer is not complaining about it.” He’s tackling it head on. So did Intel when Andy Grove gutted it to shift from memory chips to microprocessors. So does every technology company CEO. It is ingrained in the industry Andreessen comes from, so it is just obvious to him: “You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.” Media companies need to learn that lesson fast. To the extent that their products are now delivered and consumed as digital bits, they too are becoming technology companies.
Beyond the iPad, he believes that all the talk once again from big media companies about erecting paywalls or somehow charging for news, articles and video online is shortsighted at best. He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.
Hi Erick, nice article. You may want to correct the link to Andreessen’s deathwatch; the href tag appears as text in the post itself.
Intel definitely did NOT “shift from memory chips to microprocessors”. The microprocessor has been Intel’s bread and butter from the start. They got into memory chips later and got out.
No, Intel’s main “bread and butter” business in the 1970s was selling SRAM and DRAM memory chips. While it always made microprocessors, it wasn’t until the rise of the PC that microprocessors became the main revenue generator of the business. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Corporation
Funny, of all the expedition of Cortes, why pick this one? I mean, okay, to bring relevance to the article, then they pick the burning of boats..
but couldn’t they come up with something better? hmm, like putting the beheading-spree adventure of cortes into the old media of today kind of story?
Anyway as for the post, it appears where dealing again with the iPad debacles, so let’s get it on!
it’s sad that there are no micropayment solutions for websites and blogs. the micropayment model works. it worked for song downloads, and it works for online games, but it needs to be centralized and unified in a way that will make maintaining a micropayment balance and paying to read an article seamless and effortless for the reader [facebook connect + credits maybe?].
they just need to get over the subscription model. There’s so much stuff on the web, it’s just not feasible to maintain monthly subscriptions to a gazillion different magazines to read what you wantk, when you want it.
That’s what Flattr (flattr.com) is trying to do. I like their proposed implementation. I’m hoping it will take off.
big corp wont touch that with even a hot iron, its forever tainted by piratebay.
What’s amazing (but not surprising) is that telecom companies didn’t jump on this, they are the ones who could put up a micro-payment solution.
It actually happened once and was a huge success, the french Minitel terminal (a dumb terminal that France telecom gave away in the 80′s) they charged by the minute for text-only service with 2 bit graphics and made billions. The secret formula: since they just added the charges to your phone bill it was a completely painless process for the end user (except on the wallet, it wasn’t cheap).
The telcos did try micropayments. The UK PTO for example operated Prestel which charged 1 to 3 pence for bulletin board services in the from 1979 into the 1980s. Unfortunately individuals wouldn’t pay even 1 penny for most pages and corporates feared the undefined operating cost so the service had very poor usage. It’s not just the payment problems. People just don’t like paying for things and the mental barrier for a micropayment is actually to high so you might as well ask them for $15 per month as a penny a page. We now have the internet but people haven’t changed.
@igniman’s “micropayment model worked for song downloads, and it works for online games”
These are NOT micropayments (working or not) as they were once defined. The term has been hijacked, and misappropriated by several other payment systems, which can be said to be “working” only because there are no better alternatives. As once defined and [under]promoted, however, micropayments meant microscopic-scale (think US$0.0000001/kB) transparently-metered access to the Internet, where every byte of content was equally worthy of being paid for; the actual payments would accrue in an unotrusive manner; and would be paid via mutually agreed hands-off debit route.
There are some notable exceptions. For example, papers like The Stranger (www.thestranger.com) in Seattle have always been free and they are perhaps one of the most innovative media organizations in the digital world. They get 2 million uniques at their website monthly and rather than looking for a silver bullet to deal with the lag in the standard advertising model, they have brought out the Gatling gun:
They have numerous innovative ventures with different models (lovelab, strangermart, ticketing for local events etc.). They also have a tight and loyal community that are regular contributors to SLOG (their blog) and they have Questionland (http://questionland.thestranger.com) where the community can ask and answer questions about Seattle.
Maybe being free to being with was the key to their ongoing success. Paywalls have never crossed their mind. They are a good model for the old media, if you want to be really great you should be digital while still having a paper edition – and it’s free!
“Maybe being free to being with was the key to their ongoing success”
Do they make a profit? Using page views and subscribers as a measure of ‘success’ is so dotcom bust. Without positive cashflow, your business is a dead man walking. Anybody can get a million users by giving something away for free. Turning a profit however, that’s what real businesses do when they grow up.
Well said.
They are a private company and don’t report their earnings, so the only metric available to me is their uniques. I do however know that they are doing very well, unlike most newspapers. If you have a look, you’ll see why. They are outspoken, creative, cater to a specific community and foster it. Their style of journalism is what the best blogs tried to bring to media, but they did it long before.
They are profitable and very successful. They pre-date the dot.com but and were never part of it. Did you even check it out?
I agree that this is a good example for old media, but in reference to the article I think it’s much easier since they had much smaller (if any) boats to burn. It’s easy to be innovative when you have little to lose.
I’d have to disagree with that. Like any other paper they had everything to lose. Perhaps more so because they were and are a profitable organization and fixture in the Seattle media scene. They have a dedicated readership which makes the risks all the greater. Meanwhile, they have maintained the cultural contributions one would hope to get from a paper: they have kept their arts sections while others have dropped them.
Meanwhile they have less money to develop new technologies like the NYT and have spent their time using technology to benefit their audience and their bottom line.
If anything I’d say it’s harder to lose a business that is your lifeblood and that you have built from nothing than it is to lose a shareholder owned corporation built by others.
Finally someone who’s been doing some thinking! You are right…”Free” is not a business model. Media rushed in to set up websites and gave their content away for free because “everyone else was doing it.” Advertising dollars were flowing freely so the party continued. Now they’re sorry. Hard to get people to pay even one dollar when they’re used to getting it for free.
Unlikely that print will die. It’s death knell was sound when radio was introduced, again with the advent of television, and again when cable got started. What I expect will happen is that print will have to get a whole lot better in order to survive – either in online or offline formats. Editorial got really sloppy during the boom years. The survives will be the ones who can develop proprietary, high quality content that’s a “must read” for their target audience. That means a doing a 360 for many media companies.
I also concur with Jim Long. Excellent comment.
By and large, I don’t think technology companies understand what media do, in particular when it comes to journalism. A great many of this forward-thinking technology pundits put all of their faith in the app empowered crowd or the cloud or whatever. Erick you above all people understand that it it is very human feet-on-the-street that fills columns. I’ve seen you in action.
I was at a Google journalism event in DC last week where James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly aptly stated “information wants to be freed, but people want to be paid”. Burn the ships? Sure, but i wouldn’t burn them all at once. Those ships are still providing revenue in many cases.
I agree with him. Also, please give up on the whole “good journalism is worth money”. NOT IT’S NOT. It doesn’t matter that you think that’s the way it “should” be. Please start living in reality. Good journalism doesn’t win over bad journalism. The winner is the party that can differentiate themselves from the crowd in a way that will earn eyeballs. The media has failed to do this. I believe it’s because they stubbornly hold on to the “good journalism should win” way of thinking. Please face reality.
Sorry to break this to you, some of us actually like balanced, quality journalism and are willing to pay for it instead of the reading free SEO-ed blogs that keep babbling over the tweets of the day without doing even an hour’s work of investigative work, let alone thinking.
Has it ever occurred to you that good journalism might be a way to “differentiate themselves from the crowd in a way that will earn eyeballs”
For example, though they don’t call themselves journalists I subscribe to a company called Stratfor (they’re a “private intelligence firm”). I do so because when they say things they provide the statistics that they base those statements on so I can verify their conclusions for myself.
Last I heard (last year) they had 2 million uniques and who knows how many paying subscribers (at $349 a month).
Good Journalism is good analysis. And really good analysis you will never get for free. NEVER. Not in this universe. What you meant is not journalism, it’s “reporting”. Reporting is the future for the mainstream. And reporting is cheap, thats because you can finance reporting with advertisement. Thats why paid reporting has no future. In the case of reporting, the article wont be the product sold in any way anymore, the advertisements and sponsoring contracts will be the product sold. This conflict of interest will corrupt mainstream journalism(reporting) much further as it already is. But exactly that is why paid journalism(good analysis) will never go away. There are few things more valuable than objective analysis. But it wont be visible from the mainstream media, it will be niche and for business.
This time in English
By and large, I don’t think technology companies understand what media do, in particular when it comes to journalism. A great many of these forward-thinking technology pundits put all of their faith in the app empowered crowd or the cloud or whatever. Erick you above all people understand that it it is very human, feet-on-the-street newsgathering that fills columns. I’ve seen you in action.
I was at a Google journalism event in DC last week where James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly aptly stated “information wants to be freed, but people want to be paid”. Burn the ships? Sure, but i wouldn’t burn them all at once. Those ships are still providing revenue in many cases.
I agree. It seems that Andreessen, if he ever was in touch with reality, has totally lost it now, and that there is nothing beyond the Valley.
He actually stated on Charlie Rose that the New York Times should be shut down, immediately.
He ignores the fact that millions and millions of people still enjoy reading newspapers, the feel of holding them, etc. There are also hundreds of local papers in small towns that are part of daily life and that, although some are failing, they would not go away.
It is sad that he continues to express his screwy opinions. He has become another one of the clueless Valley millionaires incapable of seeing reality up and close. But then again, he is filthy rich and doesn’t need reality…
i think he’s talkin directly to guys like you, burn the fucking boats now!
A Google journalism event is an oxymoron. Google is a pure advertising company. It has never had any interest in building a journalism function to fill the space inbetween its advertisements. It fills that space with content.
Obviously Google’s model is more profitable but whether content or journalism is better for society time will tell.
Eric and Marc have money in technology companies and write as PRs for their industry.
What image is this?
So what? Ads are suppose to fund the entire model?
I really how this could happen…
The Cortes analogy is flawed. Cortes did not burn his ships upon arrival in what is now Mexico; he held on to them as long as he could (four months) and then only burned them as a last resort when a couple of his captains (Sulzberger? Redstone? allied with his chief rival (Murdoch?) threatened to use them to return to Cuba, recruit an anti-Cortes army, and come back to Mexico to put the enterprise to an end. It was a do-or-be-hung choice — clearly not the situation that print publishers find themselves in in 2010. Yes, great newspapers like the Times have taken a hit, but I’d be willing to bet they’ll be around, in their print form, a lot longer than the Kindle is. And don’t forget, Cortes rebuilt his ships after the Aztecs chased him out of Tenochtitlan the first time, and those ships were critical — along with 10,000 Tlaxcalan warriors — in securing his supply lines and final victory over the Aztecs.
just burn the boats, ok tuffguy?
The term “burning your boats” comes from the Roman Emperor Julian (331-363 AD). Julian came as close as any Roman general ever came to conquering the Parthian empire.
To settle a strategic debate, Julian ordered the boats being used cross the Tigris River to be burnt – where it trapped between the Persians and the river and subsequently perished.
The decision to burn the boats took his campaign from massive success to defeat and destruction.
@ Mitch Nauffts
Thanks for pointing that out. And let’s not forget that SMALLPOX won the battles that the Spaniards never had to fight for themselves! It took the Spaniards 2 YEARS to defeat the Aztecs, even with cannons, thousands of Indian allies, and horses.
wasn’t Andreessen the idiot behind the collapse of Netscape?
Sure MSFT cheated but to build a company that depends soley on one product is stupid.
Mark Andreessen is the Jerry Yang of the 1990′s.
+1. What is Ning doing again? I’m not even sure why anyone is listening?
The answer to a shrinking cash cow problem (which is not new its been around for 100s of years) is not to kill the cow or burn the boats.
The other thing Andreesen doesn’t understand is that responsible adults running a company arent tasked 100% with finding ways to run their companies for ever. They are supposed to maximize the present value of all future cash flows. Which you do by focusing on your existing cash flows. Good companies shrink and die, it’ll happen to Google too down the line. Just like netscape!!
In hindsight, I wonder if Andreessen feels like they cheated.
It has to be the irony of ironies that MSFT giving away IE was one of final legal nails in the coffin for them to be convicted as a monopolist, and forever eschewed as *the* evil empire, yet NOW “giving it away” is not only supposed to be everyones “business model” – believed nearly to a degree of religious faith.
Andreessen may have been a great technologist, and his work on browsers played a tremendous role in the evolution of all of this stuff, but his track record in successful, profitable business is much less noteworthy.
As other commenters pointed out, his Cortez analogies is factually flawed, and therefore really doesn’t make any sense in the context of still profitable print-media venture.
This is more of a “world according to me” thing, than sound business advice.
> Andreessen may have been a great technologist [...]
Andreessen was just a programmer who happened to be in the right place at the right time—when adding images to HTML came pretty far down on Tim Berners-Lee’s list of priorities at CERN. Perfecting his own NeXTbrowser, the first graphical web browser ever written, was deemed more important, alongside other worthy pursuits of optimizing the www-libs, etc. I participated in www-talk and, to a lesser extent, www-dev mailing lists in 1993, and I do not remember there being any great deal of longing for the pictures. So that’s Anderseen’s sole claim to fame (or infamy as purists would have it.)
Andreessen is also the dolt who was making the news talk show rounds a few years ago making the case for exporting all of America’s manufacturing jobs overseas and arguing that it would be good for the economy. And we all see how that turned out.
Why does anyone pay any attention to anything he says? He has no background or education to give any advice at all. He’s like the elderly retired man at the local diner telling everyone around him how he’d solve the world’s problems.
I think what Andressen is saying is that old media companies are struggling to embrace the change and they need to do something radical and buy into it or they are toast.
The strategy needs to be 1) let’s figure out how to make money leveraging the new technology and changing social habits and 2) let’s gradually shed all legacy costs and not 3) let’s see try and protect our century old business models for as long as we can.
Many companies are doing 3 and are shifting to 1 and 2 too slowly even if it’s at least 5 years since we all know how this is going to turn out.
It is true that my father still buys newspapers and magazines, but I stopped buying them about a year ago and my younger sibling have never bought one as they consume everything via the web (not apps by the way).
The French Quebecians had also burned their boats in an effort to scare General James Wolfe, when Canada belonged to France.
Do you know what happened?
Wolfe ignored the boat burning, then DID NOT burn his boats and instead used them to sail up to the Abraham plains and proceeded to devastate the Frenchmans and subjugate them to the British crown which they still are to this day.
My words to old media:
The king does not have new clothes, he is simply naked. Do not listen to the words of your competitors like Rosenblatt. He wants you gone so he can dominate.
Leverage what you have!!! Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it is merely transformed.
Damn, I should be a consultant! LOLZ!
“On June 21, the masts of 3 three British vessels could plainly be seen from the French positions at Québec. One of the French fireships was consumed in a vain attempt to burn them, and several firerafts and a sort of infernal machine were tried with no better success”
http://bit.ly/9yQx45
Burning what you have rarely, if never works, except to please those who dislike you.
This is my fear for Apple. When companies get big and respectably successful, and that share price means successful compared to the $13 it was a few years ago, complacency becomes a problem. Suddenly the lawsuits are flying more than the new ideas. Sure the iPad may be a hit, but new idea it’s not. Mattel is another good example of an established business trying to tell the market what the market should want. The Bratz doll while not to my taste and definitely not Mattel’s liking is clearly what the market wants. How did they respond, just like Microsoft. Put it on the shelf and pray the market will forget the product it actually wants. The newspapers just like the music and movie industries and increasingly Apple are trying to force feed the consumer the idea of what the consumer should want and how they should want to consume it.
Pure innovation is an offensive posture and any business should be able to recognize that ip defense is a defensive posture. Add up all your business activities and press and if you’re spending more time in defense, your forward momentum is clearly shifting toward neutral.
“If It Ain’t Broke, Why Fix It” is too much of our corporate mindset. Before you know it, everything “GETS OLD” comes ambling up to put a nail in that coffin.
Seems to me that tech companies haven’t exactly figured out how to make general journalism pay, either. It’s a bit silly for Techcruch, with its position in the teensy field of insider-tech stories, to swagger forth about solving problems and — har har, ‘burning boats’ –without offering even the slightest hint of where to go from here.
Or, for that matter, a firm grasp of history and metaphor: Do you mind pointing us toward the City of Gold, Erick, before we strike our matches?
The problem with the article is that no one gives a f*ck about what Andreessen has to say any more.
Is that why 760 people have RT this article?
760 people have RT’d this article as a way of saying,
“Look at me. I read Techcrunch and am cutting edge. I’m informed. Please respect me. Please.”
I don’t agree that they should burn the boats right now, I’d recommend they down-size with a view to burning them eventually in 10 years time.
M.E. Sprengelmeyer, the noted eccentric publisher/editor/newspaepr owner in the western part of the USA, and a very good one at that, the subject of a recent [late 2009] NYTimes profile by Ricard Pena-Perez, told me recently:
“If someone ever calls the print newspaper product that I produce a “snailpaper,” I will slime them.”
What a true statement indeed. The media companies, such as NY Times are shifting. But what about the even bigger media company? The Hollywood business itself. They have long been the sole bearers of distribution for DVD’s and Theatrical releases. Why not let the people decide what should be available to buy? TV Pilots would get adoption not on a someone at NBC or Showtime deciding it, but rather the people themselves demanding more by paying for the first show and it getting enough funding for the second, and so on.
Check out http://vidli.com/NB20100306TC for more info. Or reach out to me with the contact details below by phone or email. I’d be happy to discuss.
—-
Nathaniel Steven Henry Brown, CEO & Co-Founder
Vidli – The Official Video Licensor
Direct: 303-588-4356
Email: nshb@vidli.com
Erik, on TeleRead founder David Rothman’s ”The Solomon Scandals” blog, he links to a love song to printed newspapers by Taiwan-based blogger/journalist Danny Bloom, titled“I Just Can’t Live (Without My Daily Snailpaper)”, which Carl Bernstein listened to and said he loved it. Chris Meadows at Teleread says ”it’s a remarkable song, full of nostalgia about various newspapers and personalities associated with them. It definitely grows on you over its 6-minute length.”
But he adds, and this is cool, too, because we are all in this together, “But at the other end of the spectrum is the TechCrunch piece in which Eric Schonenfield talks about a recent conversation with Netscape-founder Marc Andreesen [about the need to kill off print newspapers sooner than later]. If that’s true, then sooner or later Danny Bloom and those like him will have to get used to doing without their daily ‘snailpaper’.”
Erick, give the song a listen here: your reax?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZKIk1Krp8
Mr Bernstein, you remember him, the old Watergate guy, who is in the song, told me yesterday by email: “Your newspaper love song is delightful, the message is right, and your voice is on target…”
Let’s have fun as the ships go down!
Why should newspapers stop printing? There is a very large audience that buys newspapers even though they can find them online. Do you know why? Because many people like to read a paper newspaper. You don’t browse the internet when you’re eating breakfast. But you read a newspaper.
So much leakage for the small guy to eat up without overheads, I just love it. It’s like the TV networks, they just make money on ads, as does Google, get used to it. Paywalls won’t work. Good luck with that freemium thing as well.
Law firms should adopt a Freemium model:
Clients can have all the paper they want for free. The client charged only when an attorney actually puts words on the paper.
Old Media does not and will not be burning their boats. The “Infotainment Industrial Complex” is poised to take New Media out to the woodshed and club them into the ground with ACTA in the various national legislatures.
What’s been driving the New Media Revolution is the zero delivery cost. New Media costs nothing to deliver, copy, transmit, re-copy, re-mix and re-transmit whereas Old Media
Enter ACTA. A noble-sounding treaty on copyright whose purpose is less about protecting intellectual property and more about forcing the burden of IP protection and verification on everybody *BUT* the Copyright Industry. Rupert Murdoch would LOVE to see ACTA passed because this sort of burden/cost transfer means that New Media would actually be forced into the same transfer/overhead costs that currently plagues Old Media.
Playing Field levelled, game over. Thank you for playing and oh, by the way, thanks for building all this wonderfuly technology and distribution network that will give us control like never before.
If you are a online content provider/producer of any size and you don’t have lobbyists working for you(and against) at the national legislative level, you are just asking to get whacked in the law.
..great comment and thanks for pointing that out.
A realtime or customizable magazine or newspaper can bring added value but if old media is thinking of running monthly (magazine) or daily (newspaper) releases on new formats they are kidding themselves.
As a young consumer I have paid for a couple dozen magazine subscriptions over the years, way more than any money I’ve put into apps. My price is about $10 a year. The biggest problem old media faces is content freshness, and the second is justifying their value vs all the free sources available.
Eric, you really don’t know that the idiom comes from the ancient Greek legend because you are such a dropout or you are just pretending?
I’m just curious…
haven’t you noticed the product is not worth paying for? web or print.
oh, the product will be TECHNOLOGY……..what about NEWS.
There will always be a need for print editions. Maybe not in the volume we have now, but to maintain the historical record….
Honestly, how often do you come across content on the web that you would actually pay for? There’s your bottom line.
I looked at this pay magazine http://www.zinio.com for iPhone and iPad.
Old Media may think they have a shiny new toy to sell subscriptions but I think Andreessen’s advice spoke to why zinio and others will fail.
Traditional media does’t understand new media.
New media does’t understand traditional media.
Until they understand one another, there is no resolution.
Old media has been battling with new media for almost 20 years. Netscape, when subjected to almost identical competitive pressure, barely lasted four.
So I find it extraordinary that the poster boy for facing the challenge of a ubiquitous, freely distributed competitor – and failing spectacularly – thinks he might now be taken seriously by those who, unlike him, have actually managed to survive thus far.
As a customer of Netscape who sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of product for them and never once received an invoice, I have to say that his attitude of burning billions of dollars worth of income and advocating the loss of thousands of jobs, whilst utterly insane as a business plan, is not at all surprising.
Couldnt have said it better myself. Andreesen has no clue about Old OR New media. Give it away he says. Great, now how do we make a profit? Oh hang on, that was the problem Netscape (and loudcloud etc) had but didnt seem to bother this revolutionary CEO…
Burn the boats???? He’s saying burn the money more like!
Honestly I don’t think you could burn any ships even if you tried. Just look at the revival of old media like vinyl records and yes, even VHS tapes are becoming cool again. The iPad still has to prove itself and after reading a couple of e-zines and e-books, people might quickly become nostalgic for their old-fashioned, physical media.
Also, Apple’s strategy of making you pay for every pixel you download might collapse upon itself. In short: I wouldn’t burn any ships yet!