MOLI VIEW™

For some tech types, the year is punctuated by conferences: CES, E3, and the MacWorld expos. For those charged with selling their visions to the public, however, the most important time is Black Friday. The day after Thanksgiving has become a sort of unofficial shopping holiday for a country that really ought to be saving more. That's when the goods hit the stores — and either sell or sit there.

If all goes well, this is when products go from being experiments for early adapters to standard equipment for the middle class. I'd argue that one of the most important moments in the history of Hollywood was Black Friday 2003, when Wal-Mart used a $30 DVD player to draw people into stores — a clear sign that the DVD format had hit the mainstream. The day after Thanksgiving also inspires the kind of price cuts that have made flat-screen TVs and high-end PCs popular enough to change the way we think about home entertainment.

As big-box retail stores change the way we think about technology, technology is returning the favor. For several years, sites like Fat Wallet and Bfads ("Black Friday ads") have been grabbing an advance look at newspaper advertising circulars and reporting on the prices before they're published. This seems harmless enough — it is advertising, after all — but retailers like Wal-Mart have pushed back with cease-and-desist letters, according to an article in The New York Times. This could well be the least important free speech issue of our time.

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