Gary Marshall: We can land on comets. Why does everyday tech still suck?

Travelling to a hurtling ball of space rock can be done, but our Wi-Fi is still crap (credit: ESA/ATG medialab)

This week we've been marvelling at the images beamed back to Earth by Philae, the plucky little robot probe that's currently parked on the excitingly named Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The mission's even more impressive when you consider that in the 10 years it's taken Philae to reach its four-billion-mile target, we've seen astonishing advances in technology. And that's got us thinking. Surely if the tech of 2004 can send a robot four billion miles and parallel park it on a flying ball of rock, the tech of 2014 should have eradicated all kinds of annoyances by now? If we humans are hot stuff, why haven't we solved this little lot?

Many mobile phone contracts include a free subscription to someone else's wireless hotspot network, and that subscription never, ever works no matter how strong the signal or how up-to-date your mobile apps are. Maybe the hotspots are made of some kind of mysterious dark matter, or maybe they obey universal laws we humans simply can't comprehend. Or maybe it's that hotspot operators couldn't care less about supporting people who can't cancel their memberships. The truth is out there.

Come on people, we've been trying this since the 1980s: how on Earth can we send robots billions of miles but we can't make a smartwatch that doesn't look crap and deliver decent battery life? Even the Apple Watch is going to disappoint on that front, especially at the high end: a four grand watch that you need to charge every day?

When Philae began its mission, Microsoft had Windows XP. When Philae landed, many people were so impressed by Windows XP's successors that they were still running Windows XP. Windows 7 only overtook its market share in 2011, and despite Microsoft's decision to remove support for the ageing OS and have all its users killed earlier this year, XP still has 17.18% market share of desktop OSes and what appears to be 100% of the market share for cash machine OSes.

Like Philae, we like nothing better than exploring far-flung locations - but unlike Philae, we have to download eleventy-three terabytes of crucial patches and infinitesimal improvements every time we try to play Alien: Isolation on our consoles. Which reminds us of an old Eddie Izzard gag: wouldn't it be great if, as a practical joke, the European Space Agency released Philae photos that appeared to show space aliens? Go on, ESA. You know you want to.

We have a battery problem here on earth: everything has gone mobile, and the advances in tech (and our demands for MOAR POWER) have wiped out the comparatively modest advances in battery tech. Philae has a bit of a battery problem too - it appears to be in a dark location, which isn't great for solar charging its backup battery - but let's get some perspective here: it's still working after travelling FOUR BILLION MILES, and its instruments being used on and off for the last five years. We can barely get our smartphones to last from our house to work and back again.

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Gary Marshall: Taylor Swift is too smart for Spotify

Superstars make more money from sales than streaming.

According to reports, Taylor Swift is doing something really dumb, and we don't mean dating members of One Direction. The pop sensation's decision to pull her albums from Spotify means she's missing out on thousands of dollars in royalties, and she's been depicted as a kind of singing King Canute trying to turn back the waves of musical progress.

Those reports are wrong.

If, like me, you've spent hours this week trying to get Taylor Swift tickets for your kids, you'll know that Swift and her management are fantastically good at making money. Between the fan club presale, the venue presale, the American Express presale, the Ticketmaster Platinum presale, the sponsor presale and the VIP ticket packages, it's never been easier to spend a frighteningly large sum of money on going to a gig.

Swift and her people are very smart. Streaming 1989 on Spotify wouldn't be. Here's why.

Like most things in the world, you can explain the problem with the help of the excellent 80s popsters The Human League. Their (Keep Feeling) Fascination was on the radio the other day, and I realised that I didn't own that particular slice of perfect pop - so I headed to iTunes to buy the band's best-of.

And then I remembered I had a Spotify account, so I streamed it from that instead. That decision still generates money for the band, but it's a fraction of what they'd get from a sale.

If you're an in-demand new artist with an in-demand new record, streaming isn't the best way to make money.

Comparing streaming royalties to actual album sales is a tough business - I'll leave that to the excellent Ian Betteridge, who's posted a great analysis of some seriously bad reporting here. But the short version is this: artists such as Taylor Swift make a big pile of cash from album sales and a tiny amount from streaming, and if people can stream the record on Spotify most of them won't buy the albums.

If you were a megastar trying to maximise revenue, you'd do something like this: you'd pull your albums from the most popular music streaming service (but not YouTube, because you're not stupid) and keep them off until CD and download sales started to die. When that happened, you'd change your mind about streaming and generate an income from the people who won't buy your records but who still want to listen to them.

The thing about streaming is that while it's good for consumers and marginally better for artists than piracy (better to get a fraction of a percent of something rather than 100% of nothing) it's pretty crap for generating money unless you're a superstar.

And if you are a superstar, you've got devoted fans who'll happily buy your records, so you don't need to rely on streaming for your income. Taylor Swift could charge much less than £61.60 for the cheap seats and £350 for the VIP ones on her UK tour, but why should she if people will pay it?

That's what's going on with streaming. For an artist capable of selling 1.3 million albums in a week, something that nobody's done since Eminem in 2002, streaming is a pretty rubbish plan B. So as long as Swift can sell records, that's what she'll do. Swift isn't trying to turn back the streaming tide. It's just that unlike other artists, Taylor Swift can walk on water.

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