Lance Knobel of Davos Newbies posts on this useful site (and RSS feed): “latin proverbs of the day”. It has a nice search function as well, so watch out for some latin erudition on this site…
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Who’s TiVo now?
It’s been an exciting week for TiVo watchers (the company, not the content), with most of the events hinting at the costs of TiVo’s failure to design a venture that built partnerships quickly in today’s technical and business climate.
But let’s start with with good news, a jury just awarded TiVo $73M in its suit against Echostar for infringing its patents “covering a method for playing one television show while recording another and a storage format that allows the pausing of live television, among other capabilities.” (WSJ, 4/14/06, TiVo Wins…). This is good news for TiVo, obviously, because as the WSJ journalists put it:
TiVo is facing blistering competition from much larger cable and satellite companies that have the advantage of already-established relationships with tens of millions of television subscribers.
In the last year, the overall DVR market has almost doubled while TiVo’s added roughly 50%. Nice numbers, but paltry compared to the overall market. And the jury decision is by no means a done deal; EchoStar has plenty of money to drag this out until, as I’ll suggest next, it’s a moot point.
In other news…
While we’ve been watching the battle between the TiVo box and the knock-off boxes of the cable and satellite companies, there’s are whole other sides to this revolution. For instance, Cablevision announced plans to move the whole DVR feature set upstream (CableVision plans)…essentially putting the storage and playback functions on their own servers:
A plan by Cablevision Systems Corp. to let cable television viewers pause and store programs on the cable system instead of living room set-top boxes drew the ire of some programmers, two network owners said on Sunday
No coincidence that this news came out at the same time as networks like ABC and Fox began announcing their own ways to allow users to view television shows free anytime they want. Disney will now begin offering video of their own ABC shows the morning after they’re aired on television :
Episodes of the ABC shows — which can be paused, rewound and fast-forwarded — will contain commercial breaks that viewers can’t skip, making Disney hopeful it has figured out a way to turn the delivery of programs over the Web into a profit-generating business. Ten advertisers, including Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble, Universal Pictures and Unilever, already have signed up.(WSJ, 4/10/06, Disney will offer…)
The same story comes from Fox (Fox logs on):
Though Fox has lagged behind the other networks in taking the step to make its shows download-friendly, its plan is different in that it plans to share the revenues generated by the move with its 187 affiliate stations, something rival nets ABC, CBS and NBC do not do.
This is where it gets really interesting, as the networks must now figure out how to please their advertisiing partners–who paid for placement in people’s living rooms, and based on Nielson ratings, and not for web downloads (yet). And they need to appease their local affiliates, who lose their own advertising revenues when viewers can watch a show on the web instead of locally. But if the cablecos or the networks can figure this out they will make TiVo obsolete before it even had a chance to catch on. Why record something at home when you can stream if from the web anytime? Sure, these services are for viewing on the computer only right now, but does anyone believe that distinction will last more than a few more years?
Once again, the victor will not be the one with the best technical solutiuon, but rather the one who figures out a way to give everyone a little (or a lot) of what they want: the advertisers, the networks, the cable and satellite companies, the set-top (and PC) manufacturers, and–oh yeah–the viewer. Apple figured out the way for digital music, who will pull it off in video?
On the designer’s education
Bruce Sterling, BusinessWeek writer (author, blogger, etc…) wrote a nice piece today on the experience and transformation of the design education. He spent a year at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, teaching. His comments on the design education and its effects on students then and later are quite insightful. A snippet:
I imagined that as a teacher I might be grading their exams, running boot-camp drills, hell weeks, pop quizzes — but no, at Art Center the way is the rigor of practice. Demo or die. Practice is the crucial difference between people who can talk (like myself) and people who can design (like my best students). The Art Center kids were challenged with a small budget, a tight schedule, and a need to do something really good for their portfolio — something impressive, something worthy of public display. It was never made entirely clear to them what “good” meant. They had to sop that up from the thick smog of cultural values in the Art Center air while shut up tight with their teeming fellows in the Modernist steel monastery.
He also has some nice ideas about design and the relationship between thinking and action:
Design, as Charles Eames said, is a method of action. It’s not a method of “vision.” A designer, as Henry Dreyfuss said, is an artist who leaves the ivory tower and takes the elevator down to the ground floor…Today I find design to be thoughtful and sensible, while the daily texture of my previous life seems muddleheaded to me now, sluggish, vaguely trashy, vulgar even. Why was I like that back then? Why did I make such half-assed decisions about my tools, my possessions, and my material surroundings? Why was I so impassive, such a lazy, inveterate slob? I wasn’t any happier for that. Why did I allow myself to do little or nothing about the gross inadequacies of my personal environment? Why didn’t I take action?
In the end, Bruce catches something essential about the effects of a design education–in essence, it is about overcoming the “learned sense of personal helplessness” that possesses most inhabitants of the modern industrial world and creates a passive acceptance of our tools, possessions, and material surroundings. Not to put too melodramatic a note on it. The recent attention to design and design thinking is in many ways an attempt to teach people about their own latent abilities to change their worlds.
The creativity of the crowds
Here’s a good, brief piece in the NYT (Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas) on how the futures market approach (see the Iowa Electronic Markets for an example of tapping the wisdom of the crowd to predict political and economic events, and also futures exchange) to predicting future events can be used to select ideas from the company’s suggestion box–by letting the employees predict which ones will have an impact. This could be one of the more revolutionary approaches to managing creativity because it focuses not on helping people have better ideas, but helping management see and back the good ideas an organization already has:
[The founders of Rite-Solutions, a SW company, launched] an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company’s engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.
The pre-history of musical revolutions
Anyone interested in innovation would do well by studying the evolution of new musical genres. One of the most striking elements of musical revolutions is their evolutionary origins. PBS’s 10 hour documentary, The History of Rock & Roll captures much of this evolution in the voices of the artists themselves: Little Richard describes combining gospel with R&B (and a bit of burlesque); Bob Dylan channels Kerouac; and David Crosby finds his role model for being a rock star in the Beatle’s movie Hard Day’s Night.
But Rock & Roll’s origins go way back, to the sharecropper’s life on plantations in the late 1800s (and no doubt before). And now UC Santa Barbara, through the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, is posting a collection of old recordings (done on the orginal cylindrical wax records). Jody Rosen of the NYT picked it up in a nice articlethat puts the music in context. Take a listen.
Speaking of networks…
A good discussion in BW of the role of networks in getting work done in organizations:The Office Chart That Really Counts
Many point to University of Virginia management professor Rob Cross as a key player in making social network analysis, which has its roots in sociology, more applicable to practical business needs. Cross has formed a roundtable that boasts 53 members after just 18 months. It counts biggies such as Procter & Gamble, Merck, and Lehman Brothers as participants.
There are some who network, some who who study them, and some who teach them. Rare is the individual who can do all three.
The Corporate Citizen
In explaining why he grilled Sec’y of State Condoleeza Rice in Davos, Dr. Daniel Vasella, chief executive of Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, offers these words of wisdom–and perhaps warning–to CEO’s who feel they can and should abdicate their own beliefs and values to further the corporate mission:
The first responsibility of a C.E.O. is to run his company successfully and generate products which are useful to your customers, resulting in economic value creation. We also have to act responsibly, respecting not only the law, but also fulfilling legitimate expectations that society has of us. Today these expectations in most instances go beyond short-term profit maximization. What people want is that businesspeople behave in a responsible way in communities in which they live, that they treat employees fairly, respect the environment and demonstrate sensitivity to the problems of other, disadvantaged people in the world. I think corporate social responsibility has taken a much more important role than it used to.
And later:
…some of my fellow C.E.O.’s believe they should not express themselves on political issues at all. They should just do business. I think that is not the right attitude. First of all, we are citizens of whatever country we are from. We have a citizenship responsibility. Secondly, I do believe we have to examine our own beliefs and value systems regularly. We cannot act in a void. I think there is very clear responsibility.
As global power migrates from nation-states to corporations, the behaviors and expectations of these corporate citizens will become increasingly central to peace and prosperity.
World wide web of good
Posting for Always On, Scott Lenet, Co-founder and Managing Director of venture capital firm DFJ Frontier offers a compelling case study of corporate citizenship. As William McDonough argues, “Commerce is the engine of change.” One of DFJ Frontier’s funded ventures,World of Good, is attempting, and so far succeeding, to change the ways that first world consumption affects third world production (and social) systems.
When consumers can get information easily that allows them to compare alternatives, prices reach equilibrium and unfair advantage tends to disappear.
But imagine this model turned upside down, where the power of the internet could be used to help uninformed suppliers in a market where buyers have all the control. Craft producing villages around the world have little access to market information on the selling price of their goods as they move through the global supply chain. These producers rarely have the ability to assess the value of their labor and are unable to negotiate prices to ensure that they live above the poverty line.
This is why World of Good founder Priya Haji has introduced web-based floor pricing technology for worldwide distribution to craft producers. Literally anywhere in the world, a producer, their representative, or a buyer can test pricing in real time. This calculator shows how the price of goods compares to United Nations indicators of poverty and international labor wage data. Immediately, artisans can use this information to negotiate market prices while buyers with conscience can see how their pricing policies compare to their intentions. Using the internet, World of Good embodies a key requirement for free markets: the free flow of information.
When the solution is part of the problem
In my last post, I described the dangers of assuming a moonshot or Manhattan project could solve America’s energy crisis. The Bush administration, releasing some of their text for the upcoming state of the union address, perpetuates the myth that large-scale projects are effective solutions:
“America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world,” Bush said in the excerpts. “The best way to break this addiction is through technology.”
Not to be crass, but most moonshot projects work because, to be effective, their output (rockets or bombs) requires little to no changes in individual behavior or social values. Changes in energy production or consumption, on the other hand, will require changes in what we buy, drive, eat, etc… The danger lies in believing there is a single technological solution out there which, if found, would make all of our problems go away, because that belief prevents us from making harder choices, and taking on greater challenges at the local levels.
The more we believe someone else will bring us a (technological) solution, the less responsibility we feel for solving the problem ourselves. The real solution, if history is any guide, will come from the emergence and confluence of many local solutions.
Sustainability in the Cathedral and Bazaar
One of the problems with expecting technological innovation to solve social problems–like expecting energy research to solve the energy crisis–may be our perpetual confusion between the means and ends. It’s alright to have a moonshot goal (the end-game), but the means for getting there need not, and likely should not, be NASA-scaled, centrally-controlled, and monstrously-funded projects.
Thomas Friedman, for example, recently described Texas Instrument’s green chip factory in Richardson, Texas recently (A Green Dream in Texas). TI’s plant was designed and built in a “cost-saving, hyper-efficient green manner.” It’s not clear how efficient is efficient but, in any case, what’s interesting is how Friedman uses the green factory to call for an “energy independence” moonshot:
In 1961, when President Kennedy called for putting a man on the moon, he didn’t know how – but his vision was so compelling, his expectations of the American people so high, that they drove the moon shot well after he died. The Bush-Cheney team should be inspiring our generation’s moon shot: energy independence. But so far all they’ve challenged Americans to do is accept a tax cut.
Friedman supports the goal of moonshot. The end he has in mind is exactly what we need. But in reality, what’s harder–putting one man on the moon or a million men and women into hydrogen-powered cars? And why?
Governments are organized well to build cathedrals, but not bazaars. Unfortunately, some of the greatest leaps forward are too complicated to be solved by one single project or person; instead they take place over time and across countless, nameless people (as Jean Henri Fabre once said, “History records the names of royal bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheatâ€). Throwing money at creating the single best solution, like building one rocket, or one bomb, is easy compared to creating a technological revolution that requires an accompanying social revolution to succeed. For these problems, it’s better to build bazaars–the open source communities where ideas and behaviors co-evolve. And from which spring the real revolutions.
Andrew Hargadon 