Running as Root

The P-word has been getting thrown around a lot where I work lately. While poking around the different discussions available on the web I ran into this example of how insanely easy it is to violate many obscure patents in the routine development of an application (particularly a web application). A couple of the crazier examples of the patents pointed out are 1) ordering by cell phone, 2) payment using a credit card on the internet, 3) tabbed palettes, and 4) the use of TV as metaphor for selecting different video fragments. Holy shit those are ridiculous.

You can also view the entire presentation, if you wish.

This weekend I was in Walmart and had the same thought everyone else gets when they're stuck in a long line at the register. Namely, that I would gladly pay more money to get the hell out of there with my selected items. Ironic that Walmart is successful for being the low price leader (that and you can buy gardening tools 24 hours a day) and yet, I would gladly discard my 20 cent savings in order to put some distance between myself and the store.

Later that weekend, I watched as Lisa's aunt skipped through the line of a Dollar General by knowingly overpaying for the item she wanted. She just asked the cashier if $5 would cover the $3 in crap she had, got the nod, tossed $5 on the counter, and walked out.

So, that's my new idea for Walmart and their competitors (absurd though it may be). The store should have someone at the super duper fast checkout simply estimate how much you owe. If you think it sounds fair, pay and run. Otherwise you either wait in line at a register with a cashier (if you can find one) or you watch in agony as people that can't program their VCRs try and work the self checkout. "Look maw, it's one of them talkie 'puters like what's in that movie!"

Update

My god, hanging out in a small town got me thinking low tech. This is better suited to RFID stuff. If all products are tagged with their information you could use embedded RFID stuff on the product to automatically determine what is in the basket and instantly generate a total and diminish the need for lines at the checkout (you still have to pay someone until they get some auto-bill action down). Sure you have the possibility of fraud, but I don't think the risk is much greater than it is currently considering the recent Walmart barcode scams.

I just read that Yahoo! has acquired Flickr. I must say I'm a bit excited by this. I think Flickr is a very good service. It's one of the few online services for which I've been willing to pay money. My hope is that Flickr won't change in any negative ways, but will continue to improve in functionality and (hopefully) performance. The one downside I've seen to Flickr in that past couple of months has been their frequent performance problems and cavalier attitude towards their downtime.

The promise of pro accounts getting "super mega bonuses" sounds promising as well. If you haven't tried Flickr yet, I highly recommend giving them a spin with one of their free accounts. This, plus new of a lot of other recent acquisitions (especially by AskJeeves) leads me to believe we're in the beginning stages of another bubble. Hopefully this one will be filled with more rational thought and sound business plans. Now if someone would only buy TiVo…

I just finished a couple of good podcasts today: Voices in Your Head and Dale Dougherty – Web 2.0. Although not as spectacular as the Lawrence Lessig or Clayton Christensen podcasts, they're both still pretty good.

Voices in Your Head

The first one is with the founder of Magnatune Records, John Buckman. It's an interesting listen as it gives a little information on how screwed up the record industry is (not that we didn't know that already). Magnatune is based on a "try before you buy" or shareware model for music. You can listen to the streaming version of the music and purchase online at a price you set. The price for a CD is a minimum of $5 but apparently the average price people choose to pay is around $8. Half of that money goes to the artist from what I understand. You can also download immediately and have a CD shipped to you for an additional $4.97.

Besides the relatively unique business model, there are a few other tidbits that are interesting. They talk briefly about the fact that more and more, music is first heard in commercials or movies. It's getting to be less and less about the record company pimping and paying to get their artist's songs heard. I know the first place I heard Bif Naked's I Love Myself Today was in a Dodge truck commercial. I think it's a great song that seems to have missed out on commercial success (not sure why). Outside of the podcast, I'd also heard that Moby not only made tons of money off of licensing the songs for commercials, but they became a lot more popular afterward. Sell-out concerns aside, it seems to be another interesting way for artists to get their music heard and perhaps drive up their ticket sales (where more of their money is made anyway).

The podcast also mentions the fact that the single hit driving an album's sales might be endangered due to single song distribution sites like iTunes. A common practice is to bring in a bunch of hired guns (songwriter, producer, etc) and record one song that is a likely hit which sounds nothing like the rest of the album. In the past, you'd get the whole album and feel robbed. Now, you sample the other songs and decide to buy the single that you actually liked. They even mentioned people like Elvis Costello talking about recording and releasing songs one at a time rather than on albums–less pressure apparently. Buckman stated that he thought this would only be an option for established artists, though I disagree.

Web 2.0 – Dale Dougherty

The main thing I liked about this podcast was that Dale Dougherty talked about O'Reilly's Safari online bookshelf. The scenario that intrigued me was professors picking the most appropriate passages / chapters from various books on a subject they're teaching. They then arrange these into the combination they want and get it printed on demand. BAAAM! Instant custom textbook. This reminds me a great deal of the remix culture that Lawrence Lessig was talking about in The Comedy of the Commons.

In general, I think the days of content publishers raping content producers is coming to a rapid end. It's too easy to produce a song, a book, a movie, whatever on your home computer and then find a way to distribute it on the largest, most efficient distribution mechanism the world has ever known–the internet. The publishers add little or no value under the current model. In the past you could say they filtered out the crap for me but increasingly that doesn't stand up to the infamous Long Tail scenario. They need to revise the way they work and do something useful (and take a much smaller bite) if they want to survive, rather than suing 8 year old girls. The thing standing in the way of an avalanche of sweet, sweet content is less the issue of IP theft and more about middlemen that are too busy holding on to a dying way of making money off of exploited artists / content producers. If I were creative, I'd rather be read than bled. *rimshot*

In refrencing Clayton Christensen's podcast, I forgot to mention one of my favorite movie quotes of all time. Danny DeVito in Other Peoples' Money as Larry the Liquidator. It happens at a stockholder meeting at a company he's dismantling. His monolog is in response to the current president stating that they should try and save the existing company. And it goes a little something like this:

Amen. And amen. And amen. You have to forgive me. I'm not familiar with the local custom. Where I come from, you always say "Amen" after you hear a prayer. Because that's what you just heard — a prayer. Where I come from, that particular prayer is called "The Prayer for the Dead." You just heard The Prayer for the Dead, my fellow stockholders, and you didn't say, "Amen."

This company is dead. I didn't kill it. Don't blame me. It was dead when I got here. It's too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence. We're dead alright. We're just not broke. And you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow but sure.

You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let's have the intelligence, let's have the DECENCY to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.

"Ah, but we can't," goes the prayer. "We can't because we have responsibility, a responsibility to our employees, to our community. What will happen to them?" I got two words for that: Who cares? Care about them? Why? They didn't care about you. They sucked you dry. You have no responsibility to them. For the last ten years this company bled your money. Did this community ever say, "We know times are tough. We'll lower taxes, reduce water and sewer." Check it out: You're paying twice what you did ten years ago. And our devoted employees, who have taken no increases for the past three years, are still making twice what they made ten years ago; and our stock, one-sixth of what it was ten years ago.

Who cares? I'll tell ya: Me. I'm not your best friend. I'm your ONLY friend. I don't make anything? I'm makin' you money. And lest we forget, that's the only reason any of you became stockholders in the first place. You wanna make money! You don't care if they manufacture wire and cable, fried chicken, or grow tangerines! You wanna make money. I'm the only friend you've got. I'm makin' you money.

Take the money. Invest it somewhere else. Maybe, maybe you'll get lucky and it'll be used productively. And if it is, you'll create new jobs and provide a service for the economy and, God forbid, even make a few bucks for yourselves. And if anybody asks, tell 'em ya gave at the plant.

And by the way, it pleases me that I am called "Larry the Liquidator." You know why, fellow stockholders? Because at my funeral, you'll leave with a smile on your face AND a few bucks in your pocket. Now that's a funeral worth having!

The movie is worth seeing for this scene alone in my opinion, but then I'll watch just about any movie once.

I just finished the the Comedy of the Commons podcast. In it, Lawrence Lessig has a completely bad-ass lecture on property law as it applies to copyrights and the internet. His discussion about rivalrous and non-rivalrous commonses is a real forehead slapper "AHA!" moment, for me at least. Again, I am very impressed by his knowledge on the subject and his completely logical and well presented arguments. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I'm definitely considering buying his book Free Culture.

As I had mentioned before, podcasts were a big reason I wanted an MP3 player. So when Coté (you can't spell "content" without C, O, T, E) mentioned some worthy offerings in response to Divakar's post I immediately grabbed all of the mentioned podcasts.

So far I've listened to the entire Capturing the Upside and about half of the Comedy of Commons. I find both of them extremely informative and entertaining. I'm sure they're not for everybody as they're both quite long and some would find big sections boring (not me).

Capturing the Upside is nothing short of fantastic in my opinion. Christensen does a great job of describing how innovation should be managed. There's way too much great stuff in it for me to do it justice, so if the description on IT Conversations even remotely piques your curiosity, you owe it to yourself give it a listen.

I was particularly enthralled by the concept of his examples and explanation of the strategy of entering the market with a "crummy" product. He gave great examples of post WWII Japan producing crappy products in market areas where they had no competition. A good example was the transistor radio. It was poor quality, had bad reception, but kids that didn't own large vacuum tube radios (which were superior in every way except portability) purchased them so they could listen to that darn rock and/or roll outside of their parents' earshot. They were "competing against non-consumption." In contrast, bigger companies were spending billions in today's dollars trying to make the transistor work as a complete replacement to the vacuum tube in all of its other uses. Targeting consumers causes you to have to make a new offering better than an existing product. It must be "good enough" before it is successful. It is much easier to compete against nothing.

The other great thing was the "go where the money is going to be, not where it currently is" concept. I think a lot of companies miss that point. They continue to milk their current cash cow without ever thinking about how they need to evolve to stay profitable. Christensen makes the fine point that you cannot abandon the "current thing" while pursuing the new thing as there is still a lot of money to be made there. He also points out that the pursuit of the new market needs to happen independent of the big company. Innovation needs to happen unfettered by the rules, standards, procedures, etc of the big company. That's probably why so many good ideas come out of little startups which are then bought by the big guys.

In my opinion it's ironic most of the developers / smart people from the startups make their way into a bigger corporate environment where they make non-innovative, incremental improvements to an existing product–mostly a fix, release, support cycle. That's when bad things happen to good programmers. They begin to realize that although they've got stability now, they're no longer doing exciting things. They're doing the job that a less talented developer could do. It's time to move on. A corporation that was lucky enough to buy some good people, as well as its way into a new market it couldn't seem to get into otherwise, just lost one of its most valuable assets. And with the way the industry works, the first escapee will likely take his buddies over the wall with him. With any luck they'll jump around some startups before they hit the next big thing (with a crummy product, and that's not meant as a bad thing) and get bought up again.

I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, or even that it is actually a problem. After all, it keeps the money moving around. What I'd like to see is for good developers to get the stability they deserve in an environment that encourages and uses their innovative talents. Regardless, I will definitely be getting a copy of The Innovator's Dilemma and more than likely a copy of The Innovator's Solution. I found Christensen position to be very logical and well thought out. Please don't let my crap ass summary and discussion dissuade you from listening to the real thing.

Coté mentioned that he'd like to see an RSS feed for search results from Google. That got me to thinking that such a thing wouldn't be hard to accomplish using Google's web APIs. Being too lazy to do any actual work myself, I started searching around for somone that may have already done it for me. I found some homegrown solutions that would still require me to do some work and Google Alert which, although nice, still didn't do it for me.

I finally found out from someone's blog that MSN's search, which I have never looked at, supported such a feature. You can scroll to the bottom of the page of results and there is the all too familiar orange XML button that'll lead you to a feed. Boo-ya!!

Now just spank that feed right into your favorite aggregator (Bloglines!!!) and you're in for some fun.

I can't speak to the quality of the search or if they'll remain innovative, but I think that Google would/should start offering some of this in the future. New features like this in combination with A9's offer of a discount on Amazon purchases if you use their search engine (even though it's built on Google, I think) might actually make the area of web search engines competitive again.

Over on PVRBlog there was some discussion about the recent rumor that Apple was thinking of buying TiVo. There was a pretty good discussion about what Apple would get out of buying TiVo. I think everyone that likes Apple and/or likes TiVo believes this would be a fantastic thing.

There was a follow-up post attributing a quote to Smith Barney that said, "it appears as though Apple want to stay focused on selling select proven products (e.g. iPod) rather than gambling on unknown initiatives" and another quote allegedly Apple's that stated "Apple indicated that the DVR market seems to be a commodity whereby all players will eventually have similar hardware and software longer term."

Am I missing something? I don't think of TiVo as an unknown initiative. It's a revolutionary offering that is highly usable and addictive that is changing entertainment and has television networks and movie studios shitting their pants. Sure you could say it's a gamble with how much legal pressure there is going to be on any company that tries to give control of how content is consumed to the user, but I believe iTunes is a great example of a solution to the same problem. Apple stepped into the shitstorm of distribution of electronic music and has made it work. Why not television/movies? And as for the quote that DVRs are a commodity and they'll all be identical in hardware and software soon…Am I still missing something? I think that is a moronic statement. The same can theoretically be said of all MP3 players, cell phones, and computers. There is still a truckload of sweet, sweet cash to be made.

I think the analysts are idiots and if that quote from Apple is accurate, they're missing the boat on this one.

At lunch today two people I think were students at UT walked in completely decked out in burnt orange UT gear. That's when my wheels start spinning. A lot of college students and alumni are some of the most rabid supporters I have ever seen. They buy clothes with their school stuff on it, get tattoos of school mascots / emblems, etc. I think this goes beyond just sports, too. Hell, even people that didn't graduate from the college they attended are still ardent supporters of their school.

I realize that some corporations try calling their offices "campuses" and generally foster a school-like atmosphere. I know this is an attempt to get a student-like army of rabid slave labor. Unfortunately, I think it falls short. The majority of people I have worked with never seem to "drink the Koolaid." Some of them still fall into the category of college supporters, so it's not that they're incapable of making such a strong commitment to an organization. It's just that somehow the organization has failed to encite excitement in them.

The place I used to work for was a entrepreneurial company that got bought by a large corporation. The former owner (now president of the unit or BU or whatever) was a total corporate tool. Why shouldn't he be? I'm sure he got a huge amount of money for his company and has plenty of financial motivation. The thing that he never understood was his $8/hour phone jockeys didn't seem to share his love of all things corporate. I believe that his desire to help the company at every turn was directly tied to his financial incentives.

What if someone was able to instill the same feeling of association between an employee and company as many (though not all) college students feel for their university? I'm not sure how to go about this (maybe by giving company logo tattoo incentives, having a semi-pro football team that competes with other corporate teams, or putting problem employees on double secret probation). However, whoever cracks this is going to be a trillionaire. Ooooh. Maybe a quadrillionaire.