- Competing as Software Goes to Web – New York Times
John Markoff contrasts Apple’s and Microsoft’s operating-system-software development cultures. Everybody’s talking about incremental improvement. But:
“Software is like the tax code,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, a venture capitalist and a former Apple executive, who in the 1990s developed an operating system called Be. “You add lines, but you never take anything away.”
- The Specter Haunting Your Office – The New York Review of Books
James Lardner’s essay on three books (by John Bogle, Louis Uchitelle and Greg LeRoy) about what’s wrong with corporate America.
Most Americans are troubled by the culture of dealmaking and financial engineering and insider self-enrichment that Bogle deplores; by the callous treatment of workers and work life that Uchitelle describes; by the erosion of communities and community institutions that LeRoy examines. Not very far below the political surface, most of us feel some version of the same vexed ambivalence toward corporate America — dazzled by the conveniences and comforts it delivers, yet resentful of the tradeoffs that it continually demands; few Americans would be anything but grateful if our corporations and financial institutions could develop some respect for our non-material and non-individualistic selves. It is hard to imagine such a fundamental transformation of these giant institutions. It is even harder to imagine a better world in which they remain essentially what they are.
Archives for June 2007
Journey to Richistan
I loved the excerpt from Robert Frank’s new book Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich that ran in the Wall Street Journal last week, focusing on the rise of the butler trade among newly minted Bush-era plutocrats. It seems that the new rich want butlers, but the traditional ethos of the profession doesn’t always mesh well with the wishes and self-images of their employers. It’s like Upstairs, Downstairs transposed to the business-casual era:
Bob quickly discovered that managing a house staff has its own headaches. “Suddenly there’s all this funky politics going on in your house. Like the housekeeper might be nice to us, but she’s threatening to the other employees. So we had to get rid of that housekeeper.”
His first household manager was a nightmare. An exacting woman who specialized in formal entertainment, she aspired to throw lavish parties for prominent guests. Instead, she got Bob and his family, whose idea of a big Friday night is a mountain-bike ride followed by a big salad. The household manager was deeply disappointed. “We weren’t the rich, famous people she was hoping for,” Bob says.
I realized my own utter innocence of this trend toward ultra-pampering among the ultra-rich when I read the phrase “professional organizer” in another recent article in the Journal.
To me that term has always meant someone who earns a living organizing workers or tenants or political movements. But no, this is a person whose organizational skills are targeted at other people’s closets.
[tags]richistan, robert frank, butlers, wealth, new rich[/tags]
Should journalists learn to code?
David Cohn is a smart young journalist who I met through my association with NewAssignment.Net. Today he has posted an argument for supporting the teaching of programming to journalists (this comes in the wake of a scholarship fund set up for programmers to learn journalism).
This discussion comes against the backdrop of massive business disruption in the newspaper industry, most recently with the announcement that 100 editorial employees of the San Francisco Chronicle are losing their jobs. A dozen managers got the boot this week (also here), including several I knew from my decade at the SF Examiner — the staff of which ended up working at the Chron when Hearst essentially combined the two papers in 2000.
The fear, plainly, is that print journalists are becoming the hand-loom weavers of the 21st century. But it’s not the craft of journalism that is in danger today; that remains a reasonably valuable skill. It’s the business structure of the newspaper industry (along with broadcast TV, magazines, and more) that is in trouble. Journalists are largely the drive-by victims of a media-industry transition that started to unfold in the early 90s and that could take another 25 years to play out. Society still needs their work, but for the moment, at least, its system for paying their rent is broken.
Cohn writes: “I am convinced the only thing holding me back from organizing the type of web based network journalism I want to do is my lack of coding skills.” He might be right, if his vision goes far beyond what existing software can do. But is it really going to be easier for him to thoroughly learn programming than to learn just what he needs to communicate his ideas to a pro?
In fact, I don’t think most journalists trying to find their way across the new media landscape need to acquire deep programming skills — any more than most programmers trying to write new-media applications need to master the fine art of headline writing or the arcana of copy editing. Sure, it’s great that occasionally a cross-disciplinary polymath turns up to shake things up — and if that’s what Cohn aspires to be, more power to him.
But the pressing need is not for people who can write code with one hand and stories with the other. What journalists do need is working digital literacy. They need to understand something about how the technology that’s reshaping media works, how it’s built, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and how to harness it. Journalists don’t need to study object-oriented PHP in order to do that; yet it’s helpful for them to be able to mess with a WordPress template without running in terror.
When an entrepreneur starts a company and decides to rent an office, she might need to learn about the commercial real estate market and become familiar with what’s available and what it might take to remodel a space and even how to read a floorplan or blueprint. But she doesn’t need to master all the building trades herself.
I think Cohn is on the right track in advocating more support for the retraining of a population of displaced professional journalists. I just think they can contribute in all sorts of ways without having to feel they must add programming to their resumes.
[tags]journalism, media, programming[/tags]
Lucas, circus, and art
George Lucas drew a distinction for the crowd at D earlier this week that became something of a refrain for the rest of the event.
Lucas said: there’s circus, and then there’s art. “Circus is random and voyeuristic. What you see on YouTube right now — I call it feeding Christians to the lions. The movie term is, throwing puppies on a freeway. You don’t have to write anything or do anything — you just have to sit there, and it’s interesting. Like American Idol. Just put a camera on your neighbor’s window and see what happens. Then you get to art — where a particular person contrives a situation and tells a story, and hopefully that story reveals a truth behind the facts. With voyeurism all you’re getting is the facts.”
Lucas is a brilliant man who has told some great stories in his day. And I think he intended to defend the enterprise of making art, which we can always applaud. But with this generalization he has cast a great slur on the circus world.
I spent several years of my life as a working theater critic in San Francisco during the heyday of what was once known as New Vaudeville; I witnessed the work of pioneering Bay Area institutions like the Pickle Family Circus and saw the rise of “new circus” institutions like the Cirque du Soleil. And I do not think it’s going out on a limb to say that George Lucas is dead wrong in defining circus and art as opposites.
Circus is art. It doesn’t “just happen.” The people who perform in it spend years or lifetimes perfecting their skills.
Lucas, perhaps, really meant “sideshow” — where they used to put the freaks and the mutant animals and the geeks who would bite the heads off animals. In that sense, sure, YouTube is often a sideshow.
The videos Steve Jobs highlighted as he showed off AppleTV’s new YouTube connection were, essentially, sideshows. Mentos in Coke is sideshow. The “human slingshot” is sideshow.
But surprisingly often, YouTube is art. And when you experience a really great circus performance you encounter a kind of truth, too.
[tags]george lucas, d5, d conference, circus, youtube[/tags]
Last of the rock stars?
Jimmy Guterman’s post (also here) about the Gates/Jobs show at D is worth reading. I like his thinking out loud here:
They do have so much in common. When Gates said, “Neither of us have anything to complain about” and “We’re two of the luckiest guys on the planet,” and Jobs quoted The Beatles’ “Two Of Us” to express his affection for Gates, it didn’t seem like a put-on. Indeed, one can think of Gates and Jobs (as opposed to Gates and Allen, or Jobs and Wozniak) as the Lennon and McCartney of the PC era. They worked together for a long time and they fought for a long time, but the two of them experienced extremes that no one else in their business ever faced. For all their differences, they’re two of a kind, unlike anyone else anywhere.
Nicely put. But I think the Lennon/McCartney comparison goes too far, because, after all, these guys are and always have been primarily rivals, not collaborators, and they have done their best work apart, not together — which was not really the John-and-Paul story at all.
Perhaps — as someone else pointed out this week (can’t remember now where I read this!) — a Beatles/Stones comparison would be more apt? Elvis/Dylan? Clash/Sex Pistols?
[tags]bill gates, steve jobs, d5, dconference[/tags]
D Conference: highlights reel
Moonves interrupted: “That’s because he created it.”
Mossberg grimaced. There was not a single laugh in the room.
It is one sign of hope for the world today that this dead old line — discredited eons ago — now evokes only contempt.
Meanwhile, here is Moonves’s stirring defense of his medium against the complaint that TV caters to too much of our love for celebrity news at the expense of more pressing issues: “I think there are other things that may have hurt the fabric of democracy more than the media.”
According to Moore, Time’s editorial staff are beginning to have the exact experience I and my colleagues did back in 1995 when we moved from the newspaper world to the Web: the flood of reaction from readers is energizing in a way you can’t imagine until you experience it.
“The really big breakthrough is, editorial drank the koolaid,” Moore said. “The people leading the charge are the writers. You used to hang around the mailroom waiting for letters to the editor, and when you realized you could write online and get thousands of responses from readers… Writers also like how they’re edited less heavily online, she added.
It’s ambitious, and Calacanis says he has money to keep it up for five years. But isn’t it just Yahoo circa 1995 — or DMOZ? How will its results keep up with the dynamically changing Web? How will it scale? I wouldn’t write it off, but I wouldn’t bet on it, either.
The D crowd was distinctly unimpressed. But for a journalist on the road, it looks like a great e-mail and note-taking machine. I don’t even have a smartphone, but for $500, I could see wanting one of these. And, hey, you even got a Trackpoint without springing a fortune for a Thinkpad.
[tags]d5, d conference, foleo, jeff hawkins, philippe dauman, stephen colbert, mahalo, jason calacanis, les moonves, ann moore, time inc., viacom, cbs[/tags]