Entries Tagged 'sad' ↓

Utter sheer amazement, the sad part is that it is perfectly true, the music industry is all over radio right now to pay royalties for the first time ever; saying not to pay the artists for air time is tantamount to piracy.

The interesting part, read the wired story here, is that while Rome burns down to the ground, artists are playing around with new revenue models, people have completely altered how they search and consume music, the real question is just how viable is plain old radio on top of that. While independent stations might get a break in the annual fee’s, the larger radio stations will end up with the very short end of the stick if this kind of thing happens.

Many issues on how people can use their own digital media, or someone else’s digital media in what was formerly a fairly dull industry of payola, excess, and the host of other things that go along with it. One cannot but look at all these “last acts of a desperate company” and wonder where music is really going to go.

If we have to play something every time we start it off, that is going to be a real problem down the road, the money is just not there, at 99 cents or at any cost. Some will be able to afford it, but not many. Frankly, if radio is piracy, then we are all in for a very long dark night in relationship to copyright, what we buy, what we listen to, and the entertainment that we might just enjoy.

Gone will be the days of listening to the radio to hear a new band, gone will be the days of streaming radio in the office, gone will be many things that have been a way of life for everyone since the time radio was invented. So much to lose, for everyone.

In one of the weirdest looks at people’s thinking, let’s ask the audience first what does “Don’t be evil” mean to you. Did you immediately think of Microsoft, RIAA, and Big Oil? The Hillary Obama issues. Republicans? What did you think of, odds are highly likely you might have also thought of Google’s famous tag line. In an interview reported by Yahoo News comes along this tasty tidbit:

In an on-stage interview with writer Ken Auletta of the New Yorker magazine, Schmidt said “Don’t be evil” is meant to provoke internal debate over what constitutes ethical corporate behavior, rather than representing an absolute moral position.

“We don’t have an ‘Evilmeter’ we can sort of apply — you know — what is good and what is evil,” Schmidt said before an audience of media industry professionals at an event sponsored by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School in San Francisco. Source: Yahoo news

There is a sense of humor here, ethical corporate practices aside, how you feel about the latest round of political hoo-ha, or just about anything else, the idea of “Don’t be Evil” has many connotations, and is interpretable by just about anyone in any case as something different. “Don’t be evil” sounds good, but it is also just a sound bite. It obviously has nothing to do with what we thought it meant when Google started using it.

As Google wins, grows, takes more market share, the stunningly wonderful thing that no one thinks of is that as Google gets bigger, its corporate size will get bigger. Eventually they will end up being the Microsoft of their day, or the IBM of their day, or the Kodak, or the GM, Ford, or other companies that seem to get to a certain size and then implode under the weight of best corporate practices, middle management political games, and the host of other things that will start degrading the ability of a company to keep on doing good things.

Google might not be there today, but eventually they will get there, and they will have to deal with some young upstart that has a better mouse trap. For some this day can not be too soon, for others, it will happen when it happens, and for the rest, they hope that the day will never come.

In the mean time plug in your “evilmeter” and “Don’t be evil”. There is a sense of irony here.

Tags: google, tag line, don’t be evil, growth, atrophy, examples, ibm, Microsoft, ford, GM, startup, money, adventure, fun

BoingBoing, Enterprise 2.0 and Joho the Blog are all covering a talk given by CIA folks at the Web 2.0 conference about the Intellipedia, or how to kill a company in some easy business oriented steps. Quoting an old 1944 “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” from the US Strategic Services, they quote, most of the things we do today in business. There is a sense of Irony here, and most of it can be seen in many of the larger organizations that we either work at or have visited.

(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per¬sonal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.

(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and considera¬tion.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.

(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

(5) Haggle over precise wordings of com¬munications, minutes, resolutions.

(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reason¬able” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the juris¬ diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Source: Joho the Blog

While amusing, the scary part is that a lot of this is stuff we either see every day, in many companies, or we don’t see in smaller companies that have a well defined goal, with everyone pulling towards it. No wonder the startup community does cool things, while larger companies, or companies on their way to largeness at some point fall over and loose, until they streamline and get smaller again.

I can think of car companies, camera companies, big blue companies, software companies, and some search engines that are immediately coming to mind.

Says something about staying small.

Tags: intelipeida, cia, sabotage, business, fun, idea

If you never followed the Kathy Sierra debacle then go quickly catch up on this one, then start following the saga of Ariel Waldman.

Kathy Sierra who has been silent for far too long at the hands of trolls and people who were truly evil is just one example of when otherwise good social networking goes bad.

Ariel Waldman is now on that list of folks who is dealing with a very unfriendly secret stalker who is following her via Twitter. Twitter rather than deal with the issue directly and banning the user has decided to do nothing about the issue and rewrite their terms of service rather than enforce it. That essentially means that twitter is now giving a green light to a big pile of badness that is going to descend on the service, if they refuse to reign in folks who are clearly harassing other members of their service.

The harassment continued throughout the course of 2007. Since Twitter and I had an open dialog started, I would periodically report cases of continuing harassment (some of which spread between Flickr and Twitter). Twitter would take no action while Flickr would immediately ban and remove all traces of the harassment. Unfortunately, in 2008 it escalated to a level that could no longer be ignored. Tweets were being fired off directly calling me a “cunt” amongst other harassing language. On March 14, I wrote to Twitter, giving the example URLs of abuse and stated to them clearly: Source: Ariel Waldman

While web 2.0 is generally a wonderful thing, this type of behavior is nothing new, the idea of harassment even to the point of death (MySpace Suicide Debacle) means that as community managers, regardless of how you look at yourself, service or whatever, the enforcement of the Terms of Service essentially becomes an obligation if you state what is and what is not acceptable behavior. If you say “no harassment” then you have to believe and act on what people are calling harassment. You as a community manager might think it is trivial, but to the person who is believing they are being harassed, then it is a very real issue to them.

Not saying that Ariel has thin skin, putting up with an uncomfortable situation for a year all the while reporting it is also interesting, and not saying this is bad, it just shows that she is committed to the Twitter service. Twitter stands to lose a customer because of someone else, that customer will talk, and if Twitter is perceived as a haven for trolls, trogs, and other Internet miscreants, they will have people who will drop their accounts, stop using the service, and they will lose customers.

Can twitter afford to be seen as a haven for Internet miscreants?

Do they want to be seen as a haven for Internet miscreants?

All good questions, and if they rewrite their TOS (Terms of Service) to remove section 4, then they probably are going to do themselves more reputational harm than they will be doing things well. Even the phone company will help you track down someone who makes threatening harassing phone calls so you can report them to the police. For twitter to do any less than this could cause them reputational damage that they can not afford.

Tags: twitter, harassment, ariel waldman, kathy sierra, troll, Internet, service

Green Peace has gone off the deep end yet again screaming that game consoles are not green enough, pulling out a list of chemicals that they say exist in game consoles, which probably really exist in just about any environment that we live in at this point.

Meaning you should not make love to your game console, do not lick the insides of your game console, do not otherwise expose yourself to your game console, just sit back across the room and pray the controller does not harm you either. Forget about the game, it is all about the exposure to evil chemicals, forget that they most likely exist in one form or another in every electronic item you own, its all about game consoles today.

Here is why we are sarcastic as hades on this one, remember the green peace Iphone oh my god we are all going to die PANIC there are chemicals in there too? Remember how that ended badly for green peace?

The report also claims that Greenpeace fails to highlight the fact that, right now, there are no alternatives as effective as BFRs to prevent fires in consumer electronics. Also, according to the EMSnow article, since the iPhone complies with all European Union legislation, “the BFR most likely used in the iPhone is actually a reactive—i.e. it reacts with other substances to form a plastic and, once reacted, it is also no longer available to the environment.” Source: Gizmodo

Yet more alarmist happy hoopla from the folks who are in this for the political issues, not really to do good anymore. Green peace at one point was most likely a good organization, but their alarmist BS that comes out every once in a while is pretty lame.

Just enjoy your game console, recycle it when you are done, and do not expose your bodily fluids to your console, things should be ok.

Tags: greenpeace, green peace, bs, alarmist, panic, chemicals, game console, wii, ps3, xbox 360

66 University of Washington tech workers are going to be hitting the streets on the 30th of June 2008 due to a “perfect storm of events” that has lead to the largest layoff at the University in near a decade. The scary part is that this is a two part issue, one financial, one technological. On the technology side, a state run institution is finding that they can not compete against the likes of free services provided because web 2.0 is so very effective in delivering commodity services. Even some of the homeless in Seattle have e-mail, it is not surprising then that UW Technology Vice President Ron Johnson would state:

UW Technology Vice President Ron Johnson said the increasing availability of free or low-cost services on the Web through companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon.com are rendering some UW services — such as e-mail and document sharing — obsolete. He said annual revenue has dropped by $10 million, to $40 million Source: Seattle Times

The problem with commodity services is that they do what they do very well, provide an excellent service for a very low cost. The advent of Google Docs, and their competitors like Zoho means that the collaboration spaces are not needed for students, students will use their Google mail over the WebPine system that the university uses internally. As the university was unable to afford or find an alternative to the primitive WebPine system, their service infrastructure was doomed. The other perfect event according to Ron was:

Johnson said a “perfect storm” of events meant he wasn’t aware of the dire revenue situation until late February or early March, about six months after the problems began. That perfect storm included a restructuring of the financial reporting process and some key people who were “not on top of the situation in the way we would have liked,” Johnson said. A couple of people have resigned or retired as a result, he added. “There was a lot of denial going on in this,” Johnson said. “Everybody wanted to assume the rosy scenario, not the bad case.” Source: Seattle Times

Financial systems, they need those, but also explains many other issues within the university of Washington system. While the university has little room to grow because the state cannot subsidize them to a level that would allow them to grow, money had to come from somewhere. If the cross over to a new financial system caused a major disruption of the budget, then the easiest way to recoup money is to lay off people. This is money that can be gotten quickly, but the real tragedy is that many of the people coming out of the University of Washington system are going to have a very hard time competing with the modern systems that many other companies use.

Essentially, given knowledge of the systems in place, and not knowing anything else, those that are laid off will have an extraordinarily hard time being employed somewhere else. That is the real tragedy, not a perfect storm of events, but out dated technology skills in a super hot market, with no one wanting to buy them.

Tags: university of Washington, Ron Johnson, technology, layoff, sad, skills, unhappy

May 21rst is the “Boycott Twitter Day”, which is generally, refuse to use twitter for one day because people don’t like the outages that Twitter has been having. Twitter is a great service, that has seen its own share of outages and performance issues, but is that worthy of a boycott?

Probably Not.

So is this boycott really about teaching Twitter a lesson or is it a group tantrum? Source: Mediaphyter

You can read other equally interesting statements here.

Lets see, will anyone die, is there blood, anything broken in terms of life and limb, no not really. While the ebay boycott folks had a leg to stand on, if you hate twitter, go to Jaiku or Pownce, they exist, they are alternatives, do what you want. But this is really on the lower end of the totem pole in terms of significance or duration.

If you really hate twitter go somewhere else.

Just a thought, and good luck with that boycott!

tags: twitter, boycott,temper,tantrum,ebay,jaiku,pownce