Did we like music more back when we had to pay for it in bulk?
That's essentially the question writer Nick Carr asks in yet another provocative post on his Rough Type blog. "Slanted and Enchanted" revels in the one-hit wonder but also asks if we are losing something by dumping albums for tracks.
I've suggested that artists may find new ways to more deeply engage their fans by focusing on singles rather than albums, but there's something to Carr's logic:
(Credit:
iTransistor)
Today, we're quick to dismiss those ancient days of "scarcity" and to celebrate our current "abundance," but scarcity had something going for it: it encouraged a deep engagement in listening to a particular piece of music, across the expanse of an album, and it also encouraged, in the artist, an interest in rewarding that engagement. I would like to get back the money I spent on records in my youth, but I would not give up the experience that money bought me.It's the deep, attentive engagement that the Web is draining away, as we fill our iTunes library with tens of thousands of "tracks" at little or no cost. What the Web tells us, over and over again, is that breadth destroys depth. Just hit Shuffle.
There is some truth to this, but I'm not sure it matters as much as Carr implies. For every Blonde Redhead ("Dr. Strangeluv" is a wonderful track) that I casually buy and then will probably forget, there's also the Band of Horses or Arcade Fire that I increasingly find myself deeper and deeper into, track by 99-cent track.
I'm simply not ready to invest in an album yet. But I've already spent the equivalent of an album, tasting around the edges of both bands, getting myself ready to hit the "Complete my album" button in iTunes.
The singles culture, in other words, is making it easier for me to experiment with a band, to "date it," if you will, before I "marry it." It's also letting me go very broad with bands that I already like: to pay the band to experiment. (I've never met a Radiohead /Thom Yorke or Morrissey single that I wouldn't buy, though the quality of the tracks varies wildly.)
I've never believed in albums as a complete "oeuvre" in the way that some artists insist they must be. Albums have long felt like a way for the music industry and artists to sneak in weak songs and get the consumer to pay for them. When was the last time you felt that every song on an album was equally great?
Yes, some like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" or Queensryche's "Operation: Mindcrime" are definitely meant to be listened to as a complete piece, but most albums don't fit this "rock opera" genre, and the singles world, while potentially shallow, is also a great way to enrich one's experience with a band.
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Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady writes a bleak, but likely accurate, eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing. In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses," in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging "Goliath" are slim.
Peter Paul Rubens: David beats Goliath
It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business.
Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is "a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today." He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds.
This 'David' alternative to the 'Goliath' big vendors doesn't beat them, but instead helps to keep Goliath honest. Really, when you think about it for more than a few seconds, that's what open source has done for traditional computing, too.
Look around. The big vendors controlling IT and the Web are...the same vendors that controlled it yesterday, and are likely the same vendors that will control it 10 years from now. Sure, they'll swap places for a few years, but does anyone really believe that IBM and Microsoft won't still be cat-fighting a decade from now?
But now consider what open source has been doing, mostly behind the scenes. Open source is changing the way these big vendors operate, because it's altering customer expectations.
Open source has permeated Microsoft to the point that it is now considering throwing its weight behind the Spring Framework and other open-source projects.
Google, for its part, went from a happy consumer of open source to an active contributor to open source on a very big scale. Not because Google is "not evil," but because it realizes that open source can give it a competitive advantage in the market.
We'll see more of this as open source challenges otherwise proprietary vendors to compete through openness. We're already seeing some of this as vendors like Red Hat seek to claim parts of the cloud for open source.
In so doing, open source will continue to challenge and change the buying conversation, resetting expectations to transparency, something we desperately need: if the allegation that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pressuring governments to buy Microsoft technologies is even remotely true, the best antidote may be open-source procurement policies.
In sum, don't expect open source to "win" in the cloud; at least, not in the form of an open-source vendor doing the winning. Rather, look to open source to influence, to shape the cloud.
Just like it has to traditional, proprietary software.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
As someone who dearly loves reading The Wall Street Journal every day, it was gratifying to see Nick Carr blast a hole in the "everything will be free" utopian arguments from Clay Shirky and others that suggest newspapers are dead.
While the newspaper industry is certainly reeling, Carr's suggestion that a lower supply of news will translate into a greater ability to monetize it rings true:
Shirky claims we're "in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition." But that's an illusion born of the current supply-demand imbalance.
The capital requirements for an online news operation are certainly lower than for a print one, but the labor costs remain high...It's a fantasy to believe that the production of all the kinds of news that people value, particularly hard news, can be shifted over to amateurs or journeymen working for peanuts or some newfangled journo-syndicalist communes...Whatever the Internet dreamers might tell you, [newspapers] ain't going to a purely social production model...Once you radically reduce supply in the industry, the demand picture changes radically as well. Ad inventory goes down, and ad rates go up.
And things that seem unthinkable now--online subscription fees--suddenly become feasible. We also, at that point, get disabused of the fantasy that there's no such thing as news consumers. We see that providing fodder for "conversations" is not the primary value of the news; it's an important value, but it's a secondary value.
Amen. I do believe that how newspapers structure their operations, including how they charge for their services, will change, but it seems like a gullible fantasy to believe that the Web will magically create quality content via a ready pool of amateurs.
I'm one of those amateurs. I think I'm capable of writing great commentary, but I'm not the one out there doing real journalism. That's what CNET and other news organizations create.
I'm confident that the Web will reset the way in which media gets created and consumed. It already has. But the idea that content will get created in the absence of effective payment models for that content is absurd. While the creative destruction of the newspaper industry continues apace, let's be sure to focus on the "creative" and not revel in the "destruction."
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Tim O'Reilly writes a thoughtful commentary on the evaporation of false wealth in the technology industry, wealth spawned and eventually spurned by an overindulgent consumer culture. Quoting his son-in-law, Tim writes that perhaps we've reached the "pinnacle of waste in our consumer culture," and can now move on to "[w]ork[ing] on stuff that matters."
I agree, but I'm slightly surprised to see Tim writing off the wasteful technology industry, an industry that he has in part encouraged over the past few years with a heavy emphasis on Web 2.0 and all the superficial "value" that it has created. I'm not suggesting that Tim has explicitly encouraged such waste, but rather that his ideas have sparked an avalanche of rubbish business models and technology and, most importantly, have done little to actually foster the individual's role in creating value.
Tim's emphasis has been on the social web, encouraging lightweight business models and technologies that facilitate content creation and harness others' work but do little to emphasize quality content creation (and may actually do the inverse). I don't fault Tim for not coming up with the answer to the Web's failure to invest in quality, but I'm struck by the discordance between his posts on waste and comments like this. For example, speaking of Chinese factories, Tim writes:
I've often wondered: "What do they think of us, so rich that we can afford to spend money on so much that is useless!" And now we find that perhaps our wealth too was rooted in illusion.) And even when it comes to consumer electronics, we've built a throwaway culture rooted in waste.
But doesn't this also largely describe the rise of the "amateur class" that Nick Carr derides and Tim implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) celebrates? A Web so chock-full of silly, superficial speech that quality content can't rub two dimes together?
Indeed, I would think that if Tim is concerned with discovering value in our post-peak waste world, he'd be investing more time in figuring out how exceptional content will get financed in the Web 2.0 world, rather than in the technologies that make it easy to borrow content but impractical to fund the development thereof.
I'm not suggesting that Tim doesn't "get it." Indeed, perhaps I'm mostly criticizing a world that gets his vision wrong.
But I do believe there's a disconnect between the hype around Web 2.0 and the reality of getting paid. It was horribly telling that one darling of the Web 2.0 crowd - Digg - was recently exposed as gigantic revenue hole: money goes in, but little comes out. The service that elevates raises the least-common denominator of content, and thereby helps to suck money out of quality content creation, can't make money itself.
In other words, Web 2.0 popularity doesn't necessarily mean very much in the real world that requires payment for value.
A favorite passage from T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" comes to mind:
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(Credit:
Matt Asay)
Technology keeps making its way into younger demographics, a trend that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. I caught my 3-year-old trying to send "text messages, Daddy" the other day.
I guess I should teach her the difference between cordless and wireless.
To be globally competitive, the United States does need to inculcate high-tech training earlier in life for would-be developers, and companies like Red Hat have targeted youth as young as high-school age with training programs.
But I don't want my kids immersed in technology too much, too soon. I was a literature major, and still prefer reading Dostoevsky to Ars Technica, much as I enjoy the latter. Technology can assist in learning, of course, including with literature, but I also feel that something is lost when our experience is intermediated by technology, because the rhythm of technology moves much faster than old-world academics and maturation.
Nick Carr wrote about this in his insightful "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" article in The Atlantic, and took a barrage of criticism for it. But there's some truth to the notion that the Internet's immediacy makes us impatient with books or anything that doesn't deliver information in soundbites and searches.
I make my living from software, so I'm not advocating that we dump it anytime soon. Rather, I'm just hoping (and parenting toward that hope) that my kids will grow up playing soccer rather than manipulating FIFA09 on their Wii; that they'll read Tolkien, Austen, and Dahl rather than Nick.com; and that they'll text less and write more prose. We still need people who can do those things.
Nick Carr writes a fantastic piece--"Openness is not enough"--which highlights how far Microsoft has gone in the cloud, and whether anyone cares about lock-in. The answer to the first question is "shockingly far," and the answer to the second question is "not yet."
Indeed, it's the second question that I find most interesting.
Carr first quotes former Google Gears developer (and current Mozilla employee) Dion Almaer...
For those of us who worry about handing Microsoft control of the browser, plugins to other browsers, the cloud, the server model, and more.... I won't lie to you. I am cautiously observing. Silverlight adoption worries me. We can't fight Microsoft with "don't choose them, remember what they did to you before?" Fear is lame. Instead, this is a wake-up call to Adobe, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, IBM, Sun, [insert other developer / platform players] to get kicking.
We can't just be Open, we have to be better!
...and then follows up with:
[I]n this early stage of the cloud's development, openness means little to the buyer (or user)....What they care about right now is security, reliability, features, compatibility with their existing systems and applications, ease of adoption, stability of the vendor, and other practical concerns. In the long run, they may come to regret their lack of stress on openness, but in the here-and-now it's just not a major consideration. They want stuff that works and won't blow up in their faces.
The first consideration is, "Will it work?" The second is, "Will I work for it?" Put another way, "How can I make the software (and its vendor) work for me, rather than being locked into it?"
... Read moreOver the past few months, I've found that a too healthy regard for my own party line on open source occasionally kept me from seeing--or, at least, stating--truths about how to go about building an open-source business.
It turns out that there is more than one good way to "burn the boats."
Judging from Tim O'Reilly's latest post about the cloud, it looks like I'm not the only one to turn a useful trend into an all-consuming principle.
In O'Reilly's case, the principle is Web 2.0. It's a good idea with serious implications for building businesses on the Web, but it has come to explain too much for him. He dismisses cloud computing's potential to harness big systems to earn gargantuan returns (and monopoly power) on the Web. He suggests instead that Web 2.0--the harnessing of collective intelligence and the concept that applications improve the more people use them--is the key to "market domination" (my words, not his).
However, as pointed out astutely by Nick Carr, O'Reilly's single-best example of Web 2.0 dominance--Google--actually disproves his thesis. Google is a classic example of a proprietary business, not a Web 2.0 business. In an effort to see all roads leading to Web 2.0, O'Reilly fails to see that it's just one road among many, as Carr points out:
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(Credit:
The Atlantic)
It's not yet on the Web, but In the the July issue, The Atlantic has an exceptional and provocative article by Nick Carr, asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" It's a riff on Carr's book, The Big Switch (reviewed here), but covers new ground and has me worried. Carr writes:
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable...James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind "is very plastic...The brain...has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions."
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our "intellectual technologies"--the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities--we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.
"Excellent!" you say, "Now I'll be able to retrieve an infinite amount of information, like Google." Maybe. Or maybe our ability to retain and process information will continue to dwindle. Remember books? Those were the things we read before e-mail, Web browsing, and Twitter came on the scene.
Speaking of Twitter, am I the only one who views it as further evidence of a soundbite culture that struggles even to think beyond 140-character blips?
... Read moreThe web offers businesses almost unlimited commercial potential. The primary thing limiting that potential, however, is trust (or, rather, a lack of it). How do I do business with a stranger online? eBay has come up with its own answer, but it hasn't worked out as well as hoped, as Nick Carr notes:
By providing buyers and sellers with a simple means for rating one another, eBay has been able, we've been told, to avoid lots of rules and regulations and other top-down controls. The community, built on trust and fellow-feeling, essentially manages itself. Tom Friedman, in his book The World Is Flat, voiced the common opinion when he called eBay a "self-governing nation-state."
Nice story. Too bad it didn't work out.
The reason is self-interest, which doesn't always mesh well with other-interest. This is absolutely a problem with impersonal systems like eBay. It is not, however, a problem with true social networks (which map one's social graph, rather than promiscuously adding "friends" Facebook-style).
... Read moreI figured I knew Nick Carr's central thesis behind his new book, The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny, before I started. I've read Nick's blog religiously for years and was fortunate to have him keynote last year's Open Source Business Conference.
The thesis runs something like this: IT didn't used to matter very much because interchangeable software systems widely used throughout industries means IT no longer provides a basis for competitive differentiation (see pages 56-57). In the next phase (dubbed "utility computing"), traditional IT matters even less: data centers are the new utilities, allowing more efficient deployment of software applications than any one company could hope to build on its own. Jack into the network of data and services and get on with your business.
What I wasn't anticipating was where such nonchalance could lead socially. This comes in the second half of the book, and left me wishing that Nick's arguments weren't so lucidly advanced. It would have been nice to caricature his argument and move on. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's possible.
But first Utopia, before further discussion of Carr's Dystopia.
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