Category: Uncategorized

The Economist says 

Few people would have predicted this litany of disasters when Mr Bush ran for the presidency in 2000.

The challenge:

For many cultural and artistic movements there is a "counter-cultural moment" when a previously obscure and out-of-the-way tendency suddenly gains prominence. It may be the surrealists in the '30s, Bauhaus in the '20s, the hippy movement in the late '60s, punk in the late '70s – each had a few years in which it was both important and yet still opposed to the mainstream. But that counter-cultural moment is short, often just a handful of years, and once it is over, the movement either becomes the mainstream or fades away. Only nine years after the summer of '67 the hippies were a thing of the past and punk set itself up in direct opposition to the pompous and irrelevant dinosaurs that "progressive rock" bands had become.

"Geek culture" has had its counter-cultural moment. It's over.

It is now eight years today since Wikipedia started, four years since blogging, ten years of Google. These formerly "hungry upstarts" are now the establishment. Netflix partners with Wal-Mart, Google partners with CBS, Amazon is bigger than any of those "establishment" bookstores it challenged and pushes around publishers with impunity. Geek culture is now mainstream. Google, Amazon, Netflix have passed their counterculture sell-by date.

Sys-con is commonly treated as a legitimate media organization. Google News indexes it, for example, and software companies quote it. My personal experience suggests it is shameless, and that reputable people and organizations should avoid it.

Here's the story. I see that others have experienced something similar.

In October I wrote a blog post about cloud computing. I received this nice email from sys-con's Jeremy Geelan ("Sr. Vice-President, Editorial and Events"):

A colleague of mine has been to a couple of conferences organized by sys-con. A quick look at their website suggested they are one of those gazillion or so Silicon Valley tech. news sites. So I thought, OK, I know there's no money, and I'm displacing real columnists and it's digital sharecropping, but let's see how it goes. I said OK and they republished the post. No one came through to my blog from their publication, which surprised me, and I did have to tell them to remove a copyright notice which claimed copyright for sys-con, which should have warned me off, but so it goes.

Then in December I looked at my incoming traffic and saw someone had come from Yacht Vacations and Charters Magazine, which also includes my post here. I have no interest in my name being associated with anything that looks like a front for advertising junk so I wrote to sys-con at the email address they provided (seta@sys-con.com) saying this:

The email bounced. I sent it to another sys-con email address I found. I heard nothing.

Then yesterday I get someone coming to my blog from a third sys-con "magazine", CRM ("The First and Only Independent Magazine Serving CRM Developers"): from here to be precise. Also inappropriate, also without permission. Plain wrong.

So I googled some text in the article, and it turns out that sys-con has posted my piece on 19 different sites (here is the list).

I guess I could ask them to remove it again, but this is so obviously bad faith that I'll just post this and unleash the awesome power of my internet influence instead. Plus, when I get back to work, I'll write to the marketing people at work and tell them to stay well away from sys-con.

Emphasis on the con.

All this time I thought being unable to post frequently was a limitation, but now I find, thanks to the Sunday newspaper, that it is a virtue. In fact, I appear to be part of the slow blogging movement, which is why it took me two days from reading this to posting it.

Here is a quandary in three parts. I don't know how to think about it clearly, much less how to resolve it.

Part 1 is a letter in today's Globe and Mail from Charles Cook:

With a watchful eye on high-rise projects, I got wind of a new mega
condo to be built between me and this Toronto icon. When (or now, if)
it's completed, my iconic view will be gone. New condo buyers
everywhere should not be influenced by artists' impressions of the view
from an unbuilt living room. Marge Simpson may be their first guest.

The letter writer may suffer from Marge Simpson's towering blue hairdo in front of him, but he seems blind to the fact that he is a Marge Simpson in front of someone else. And the first condo building is probably more of an issue than the hundred and first. It's a vanguard of corruption.

Part 2 is the occasional appearance of groups called something like "Artists Against Gentrification" (for Detroit see here). It's a concept that is easy to mock. Seeking out cheap space in neighbourhoods that are not their own, yet which offer cultural novelty and distinctiveness, some artists like to think of themselves as champions of authentic neighbourhoods. Others cast them as the ground troops that come in first, paving the way for upscale developers.

But part 3 is more difficult for me to mock. The place I work is in a "Research and Technology Park" at the north end of the University of Waterloo (here). It's a recent development; it has a handful of new office buildings surrounded by empty fields and untended scrubland. Sometimes I walk to work through this scrub and it's amazing what you see. We have foxes, deer sometimes. The other day a hawk flew across the path ten feet in front of me at knee hight, driving a flock of pigeons into the air. There's sometimes a blue heron in a gravel pond, and a groundhog I see regularly as it watches the construction of a new building from just outside its hole.

All this wildlife in the middle of town would vanish, of course, if the R&T park gets more tenants, or if the scrubby landscape is manicured to look more attractive. I would miss it and something valuable would be lost.

Yet of course I'm only aware of these gems because I work in the first building to be built in the park. I'd like to think I'm a champion of authenticity, but I guess I'm just in the vanguard of corruption.

The quandary is obvious. There are parts of the world ("authentic" parts) that have value because they are different from their blander surroundings. And yet the value of those parts is largely invisible, and so they are vulnerable to the economic forces that would brush them aside. Preserving these authentic parts of the world requires that we know about them, and that requires someone from the outside to go in and tell us about them. So is that person then selfishly trying to preserve a private playground or nobly trying to preserve a valuable but vulnerable niche?

It's the problem with eco-tourism that the more it seeks to create awareness of the wilderness the more it damages that wilderness. From quaint pottery shops in  Burnsall and Grassington, to hippies in Goa, to Jane Goodall and David Attenborough, how do we distinguish the genuine champion from the tourist? And how do we preserve what needs to be preserved without pandering to the demands of those who want to just keep a new find all to themselves in the name of authenticity.

I can think of no general principle to tell one from the other. But if anyone has pointers to ways of thinking about authenticity I'd like to hear them.

iPhone application developer Craig Hockenberry writes an open letter to Steve Jobs here, featured in Fortune magazine here, pointing out very reasonably that the 10,000 iPhone applications are experiencing a race to the bottom in terms of price. Charles Teague has put together some great graphs describing the state of the AppStore here.

What Craig H sees is this:

and here is how:

Raising your price to help cover … costs makes it hard to get to
the top of the charts. (You’re competing against a lot of other titles
in the lower price tier.) You also have to come to terms with the fact
that you’re only going to be featured for a short time, so you have to
make the bulk of your revenue during this period.

This is why we’re going for simple and cheap instead of complex and
expensive. Not our preferred choice, but the one that’s fiscally
responsible.

The root cause of the low price is a classic market for lemons. Here is Craig H again:

I’ve been thinking about what’s causing this rush to the 99¢ price
point. From what I can tell, it’s because people are buying our
products sight unseen. I see customers complaining about how
“expensive” a $4.99 app is and that it should cost less. (Do they do
the same thing when they walk into Starbucks?) The only justification I
can find for these attitudes is that you only have a screenshot to
evaluate the quality of a product. A buck is easy to waste on an app
that looks great in iTunes but works poorly once you install it.

Our products are a joy to use: as you well know, customers are
willing to pay a premium for a quality products. This quality comes at
a cost—which we’re willing to incur. The issue is then getting people
to see that our $2.99 product really is worth three times the price of
a 99¢ piece of crapware.

This is, of course, the dilemma of the Internet. Publication is easy, even when Apple maintains the right to take your app off their store. This does not mean everyone benefits from the audience that "being published" used to bring with it. It just means that the roadblock to finding an audience is shifted further down the road – getting attention for your product. And asymmetric information is a major barrier in your way. How do you distinguish your shiny needle from the haystack in which it sits?

So where, he asks, are complex, high quality applications for the iPhone going to come from?

I can think of two ways forward for mobile apps in the absence of people being prepared to pay actual money.

One is that open source community-built applications will come along. But that's less likely on a brand new platform than it is on existing platforms where a broad agreement can be reached on what an application needs to do.

A second is that the successful applications (beyond Koi Pond) will be entry-points to some valuable service hosted elsewhere, for which someone can charge a subscription price. I'd bet on this second one. But applications for their own sake on mobile devices, it seems, will not be going far.