Last week I blogged about how I had managed to access a pay-per-download New York Times article by googling the title, thereby unearthing a free syndicated version in another paper. My comment was, I thought, suitably quirky and arcane: “take that, Sulzberger!” ( a reference, of course, to NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.).
So imagine my surprise when my next dose of spam from Tony Perkin’s Always On network was entitled “Take That, Mr Sulzberger!” The article in question is an interview with Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and all around Very Smart Guy. Since it was published three days after my blog entry, I can only conclude that Metcalfe reads Peer Pressure. Or, more plausibly, could this be an example of intervention by the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
ChasNote has a short piece on the efforts of Japan’s broadcasters to convince viewers of the importance of commercials by (you guessed it) advertising advertising (via PVRblog).
This gets right to the heart of my visceral objection to advertising. Though in a moment of weakness you could probably get me to admit that ads are to some extent a vital component of modern capitalism, as an engineer I am horrified by the assumption of many marketers that a product’s or service’s actual merit is practically irrelevant, provided you can spin it in the right way. Not only is this insulting to the intelligence of the average consumer, it is plain wrong to an ever increasing extent in this age of transparent information.
Hopefully advertisers will eventually recognize this and stop spending their hard-earned money to annoy us needlessly, passing the cost onto us. Among other things, if I have to watch one more cheezy, juvenile anti-piracy ad when renting a DVD, I’ll puke. And then I’ll stop renting movies on DVD and start downloading them via BitTorrent.
A while ago, Tom Coates posted a caustic rant asking “Where are all the UK start-ups?” His thesis was simple: Brits are as creative and ambitious as the best of them, so why are there so few truly exciting British startups? (A corollary might be: why do Brits use so many spurious hyphens, but we won’t go there.) There are a number of insightful observations in the comments for this post that suggest various plausible explanations.
From my perspective, the most important thing to add to this is that it ain’t just about Britain. I can only comment on what I know, but I would say with some confidence that this problem is shared by all of Europe. In fact, the real question may not be “Where are all the European startups?” but rather “Why does the United States have so damn many startups?”
I have an opinion about this, naturally, and Paul Graham’s latest essay sums it up nicely in a way that makes the big picture crystal clear. While I feel that Paul has been a bit over-the-top recently in seeming to advocate that everyone run out and start their own company, in this case he really hits the nail on the head. It’s a great essay, and an important one at that. What makes it so powerful is that he starts with a premise that most (and certainly most granola-munching Linux hackers) wouldn’t dream of objecting to, namely that reducing inequality of wealth is a Good Thing. He then proceeds to illustrate why this goal results inexorably in a corresponding reduction in business innovation, in the form of start-up businesses.
I would answer Tom’s question (or rather, my generalized version) in exactly those terms. There aren’t more European startups because European governments have gone out of there way to distort the risk/reward ratio of starting a startup, all in the name of reducing inequality. As any European entrepreneur knows, it’s much harder to raise early-stage financing over here because the (so-called) VCs are far more risk-averse. It’s harder to make ends meet in the first few years because you don’t get the same fabulous tax breaks as your U.S. counterparts. And if your company fails, as the vast majority of startups do, you are penalized far more (financially, legally and reputationally) than you would be over the pond.
We can lament the social inequities of U.S. society, and we can lament the lack of hi-tech innovation here in Europe. But, as Paul ably illustrates, we can’t have it both ways.
I was chatting with my roommate, Pierre, the other day, and I somehow got into a protracted rant about shifting perceptions with respect to Google. The release of Google Talk seems significant in this context since it has no obvious relevance to their stated mission of organizing all the world’s information. Of course, you could argue that a lot of information is holed up in chat messages, but I can’t see how releasing its own IM client will help Google stay on top of this. Add to this the lukewarm reviews the new app has received and you have to wonder: is Google flailing?
Then there’s the New York Times article from last week entitled: “Relax, Bill Gates. It’s Google’s Turn as the Villain” :
“I’ve definitely been picking up on the resentment,” said Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, the online payment service now owned by eBay. “They’re a big company now, doing things people didn’t expect them to do.”
Mr. Levchin, who last year founded a multimedia company in San Francisco called Slide, said Google “still has a long wick of good will to burn off,” but he added, “I’m surprised at how fast the company’s reputation is changing.”
Bob Cringely weighs in as well, wondering “Has Google Peaked?“:
But what if everyone is mainly wrong? What if search and PageRank and AdSense are Google’s corporate apex. Most companies would be content with that, but Google isn’t supposed to be like most companies. But what if they are? I hear a lot of talk about Google doing deals for video and music distribution, but where are those deals? So far it is all just talk.
I hope Google does pull off a couple more spectacular product feats, but I won’t be all that surprised if they don’t. It will take the company another five years just to mature the businesses they already have.
Perhaps the most damning evidence of this trend (and certainly the funniest, by far) is this South Parkesque comic posted to Microsoft’s Channel 9 website. It’s easy — so easy — to mock the naïveté of Larry and Sergey’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto.
My take: I wouldn’t write off Google just yet, but they are going to have to reinvent the business in a big way if they are going to make good on people’s expectations of their future financial performance. I just don’t believe that they will be able to drive strong growth forever with a model based almost entirely on advertising. I think that Cringely is right that they need to move into media sales, but it isn’t a no-brainer that this will be successful. I definitely wouldn’t be in any hurry to buy their stock at the current price.
The other lesson: it’s very hard for an ambitious, fast-growing company to “not be evil.” It’s even harder not to be perceived that way. Look at Apple: they have the cultish devotion of millions of Mac and iPod users, but they still do evil stuff, frequently. But they don’t take as much flak because they didn’t paint a big bull’s-eye on their back. Further proof that, no matter how smart your company founders are, you might not want to put them in charge of PR.
On my way home I stopped at Grand Central Station (en route from Connecticut to JFK) to have lunch with a college friend. He kindly gave me something to occupy myself on the flight home:
Find a five-digit number which, when multiplied by 4, yields another number with the same five digits in reverse order.
I guess this is pretty easy with a pen and paper, but I didn’t have anything to write with on the plane, so I had to do it in my head. My brain was aching something awful by the time I got the answer.
Update: Comments contain spoilers, so don’t read them if you want to figure it out yourself. I would be interested to know how many people bother to tackle the problem and with what success.
Pun intended, of course. Wired is running a hilarious interview with the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and his producer, Ben Karlin. The piece focuses on the internet’s influence on TV, present and future, centering on the phenomenal popularity of the Daily Show among BitTorrent downloaders. The most obvious takeaway is that Jon is a truly, amazingly funny guy. This interview could have been a chance to go into serious mode, or to spoil things by trying to hard to get a laugh, but the end result is neither. Instead, it’s a mix of genuine guffaws and surprisingly insightful commentary on what TV is and isn’t.
Some commentary on Techdirt, while complimentary in the whole, takes Jon to task for missing the boat on the difference between consuming video on television and on the internet. The point is well-taken: there’s ample scope for social interactions to be layered on top of video content when it’s delivered to a general-purpose computing device via the internet, and this may well transform the way we view TV.
Another major difference that Jon and Ben missed is the potential for the internet to solve the discovery problem.
Case in point: while in the States last week, I was more or less cut off from the online world, so I was forced to turn to the New York Times for my daily information fix. Naturally I ended up spending more time doing the crossword every day than actually reading anything. Nonetheless, I did catch a quick write-up of an HBO show I’d never heard of: Entourage. (The Times wants you to pay for the online version, but a quick googling revealed a number of other papers running the story in syndication and providing it for free: Santa Cruz Live, for example. Take that, Sulzberger!) I immediately recognized a potential fit with my viewing preferences: a glitzy show about Hollywood with everything lacking in the Czech geek lifestyle: glamour, girls and good weather, for starters. I, ehm, acquired a few episodes and, sure enough, I was glued to the LCD for my entire flight home.
Considering the amount of video that I consume online, it should have been possible to determine automatically that Entourage might interest me and to recommend it accordingly. One day it will be. With the swelling volumes of broadcast content, not to mention independent video, this type of feature may turn out to be the killer app that drags viewers off of cable and onto the net.
More and more, I’ve been taking for granted that enlightened perception of P2P has been shifting from knee-jerk condemnation to a realization that it is nothing more than a network topology that can be used for evil or (increasingly) for good. It’s heartening that BitTorrent, the most recent king of the P2P mountain, is used quite extensively for legal purposes. There’s a lot of illegitimate content out there as well, of course, but the BitTorrent culture feels a lot less slimy than that of, say, Kazaa.
Well, so much for that. As Dave Weinberger reports, Apple is refusing to list widgets relating to P2P and BitTorrent on its widget page. I’d be curious to know whether this is really a blanket ban or whether they have a beef with BitTorrent specifically. The latter would certainly be regrettable, but not as bad as promoting the misguided view that everything P2P is tainted.
I hope that someone will send up a trial balloon in the form of a truly uncontroversial P2P widget in order to test their reaction. What about a Skype widget, for example. Would they choose to exclude that as well?
Chris Anderson posts some intriguing notes from a discussion with BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen about the potential for using P2P technologies for distribution of television programs.
I’m in violent agreement with Chris and Bram at the 30,000 foot level. It’s enough to take a quick look at one of the popular BitTorrent sites to convince yourself that P2P and TV are a perfect fit. This is a product of Gertner’s First Law: since the television studios have failed thus far to provide a satisfactory solution for online distribution, the unruly masses have found one for them. The sooner the studios come up with an alternative with a viable business model, the better for them.
I’m not so sure that the ideal business model revolves around advertising, however. The press is awash with articles about how advertisers are turning away from opaque (and frankly obnoxious) television advertising in the face of growing consumer resistance. For me one of the principle advantages of downloading shows via BitTorrent is to avoid the ads.
What’s the alternative? Easy: charge for the shows on a pay-per-download basis. There’s plenty of scepticism about the willingness of consumers to pay for online content, but then they said the same thing about iTunes. This is clearly more appealing than packaging the video “in a protected form that makes it difficult to strip out the ads,” which Chris throws out as one possible solution. That sounds to me like an iron-glad guarantee that consumers won’t migrate from illicit systems based on BitTorrent. Of course, there isn’t conclusive proof yet that the paid content model will work for TV, but it certainly deserves a prominent place in any discussion about potential internet TV business models.
In case anyone’s wondering, I’m on vacation right now in Cape Cod, which explains my lack of blog postings. I was hoping to have a bit more consistent access to the internet, but as it transpires, I’m huddling in a new age internet cafe (i.e. soy milk latte, incense, yoga lessons in the herb garden, languid Indian music… and high speed wireless internet) trying to fire off a few emails before my day begins. Otherwise, I’ll be snarfing down lobsters, watching whales, getting in a round or two of golf and trying not to think about work.
I do have loads to say, so expect a return to regular postings when I get back into the office at the end of next week.
Famous hacker/essayist/windbag[1] Paul Graham just published a new essay entitled “What Business Can Learn From Open Source”. His thesis is intriguing: open source development and blogging are harbingers of future business models because people are far more motivated, and thus productive, when they are working for themselves rather than some soul-devouring corporation.
Much of the essay is essentially a rehash of what management guru Peter Drucker, among others, has been pointing out for decades. With an increasing proportion of the population qualifying as “knowledge workers”, new approaches to management are needed to maximize productivity. When your job is flipping burgers or hauling cinderblocks, there ain’t much the company can do to enthrall you, so it resorts to coercion; i.e. the traditional command-and-control corporate structure. When your work is intellectual stimulating and, well, fun, the same techniques can have a strongly counterproductive effect. What’s a pointy-haired boss to do?
Paul’s strongest insight is his alignment of open source-style management with capitalist principles:
Does this sound familiar? It’s the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.
This might not be particularly original, but it’s so damn right that it bears repeating, over and over again if necessary. The most intricate engineering marvel of all, the human brain — not to mention all the rest of nature — arose from a combination of competitive and selective forces. Paul is spot-on in his assertion that open source (and, less convincingly, blogging) has achieved prominence because it harnasses the same forces more efficiently than a rigid corporate hierarchy.
His prescriptions, however, strike me as facile. He suggests, in essence, that we should all quit our day jobs and start our own companies. He sidesteps a host of potential objections by assuming that his audience is composed entirely of “young hackers”. Fair enough, it probably is. But having quit my day job and started my own company, I can say with some confidence that it isn’t for everyone. People have different personality types, and some are better adapted to the endless excitement, but equally endless stress and uncertainty, of the start-up lifestyle.
I wish he had said more about the infrastructure that will be needed, realistically, in order to bring the benefits of open sourceishness (quick, I’ll pay cash money for a clumsier neologism!) to a wider segment of the business world. It isn’t going to happen because everyone ups and starts their own company. It’ll happen when we figure out reliable mechanisms for making money from open source (and blogging, for that matter), and how to funnel these financial rewards to those who deserve them in a transparent manner. Open source development principles may mirror those of the market economy, but without real capitalism in the mix they’ll never fly on a large scale.
[1] I couldn’t resist this cheap shot, although most of Paul’s stuff is actually quite outstanding. Obviously I’m just jealous.
When we started working on AllPeers 2.0, one of the most difficult transitions was from the sheltered comfort of Microsoft’s development environment to the wild and woolly world of the Mozilla Build System. First we had to build Firefox, which is theoretically trivial but can be a real challenge if you don’t understand how the build system works. One mistake or oversight and you’re stuck there scratching your head or (if you’re me) smashing furniture.
The flip side is that the Mozilla Build System is incredibly powerful. What ever mad geniuses thought this up crammed in every little tip, trick and hack you can imagine to get Mozilla-related build tasks accomplished with minimal effort. Since there are numerous extensions in the build tree that are compiled and packaged using the standard make process, it seemed a no-brainer to integrate AllPeers somehow into this mechanism, rather than using Microsoft makefiles or our own ad hoc process. The reality was a bit more sobering. Although it appears that there are people out there who are doing this, it was almost impossible to find any definitive information about how they are doing it.
Having climbed mountains, swum oceans and walked through fire to get the setup right, I decided to share my experiences with the world. The result is a new article: “Creating Custom Extensions with the Mozilla Build System”.
I’ve also linked this article from the Devmo Extension page, but I’ve yet to get much (okay… any) feedback on it. Does this mean it sucks? Is anyone who wants to do this already doing it far more expertly than I ever could? Does no one know about Devmo? No idea, but it was a heck of a job putting this together, so I do hope that it will be helpful to someone, someday. I know I would have killed to have access to this article a few weeks ago.
