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Semel, Yahoo, and the bet on media

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I have little to add to the flurry of coverage of Terry Semel’s departure (or should we say semi-departure) from Yahoo but this bit of historical perspective. (Apologies in advance for a certain amount of over-simplification! I’m writing today in between family events…)

Semel took over Yahoo during the worst of the dotcom downturn, an era largely forgotten in today’s Web 2.0 euphoria. His hiring there needs to be understood in parallel with the AOL/Time Warner saga. During the same time that Semel was retooling Yahoo in Hollywood’s direction, the Time Warner brass were conducting their counter-revolution against the AOL upstarts who’d seemed to have snookered their shareholders.

At that moment in industry history, everyone was making the same bet: the Web as a technology platform was a money-loser. Cash was king. You had to charge for services if you could, and keep selling ads if you could; if you could do either, you’d be OK, and if you could do both, you could prosper. The future, in other words, lay with those who bet on media, not on technology.

For Time Warner, it was patently clear that, as the dotcom debris gathered and the Web seemed to be something that could be blissfully forgotten, media represented the only future that mattered. (Since AOL was never a great technology company — its triumph was marketing — it would be hard to quarrel with that call.)

For Yahoo, born of the Web, the choice was tougher: Yahoo’s was always an ad business, but the company was justly proud of its technology, too. Semel’s background and focus sent the message that the Web was calming down into an online version of broadcast: gather eyeballs and sell them. That worked, up to a point; Semel did help rescue Yahoo from the bubble-bust, and the company survived to become one of the industry’s leaders.

On the other hand, it also missed the boat on the biggest change that was incubating throughout that era. Google’s extraordinary new business was entirely technology-based. The bet Semel failed to make on the technology side proved to be the one that mattered most. And the smart but relatively small moves Yahoo would later make to try to catch up — investments in Flickr and so on — couldn’t make up for that big miscall.

The boom-bust cycle that governs the Net world enforces a short-term amnesia: When a bubble is on, everyone thinks technology is all that matters, and when a bust is on, everyone thinks cash is all that matters. As in any market, the best returns are captured by those who make smart (and smartly timed) counter-cyclic bets.

To this outsider, Semel doesn’t appear to have been the Hollywood idiot some now see. But he steered Yahoo with the cycle. And that just wasn’t unconventional enough to produce the biggest sort of win.
[tags]yahoo, terry semel, web industry[/tags]

Next up for Code Reads: “Notes on Postmodern Programming”

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I’m on the road this week with my family, and posting will be light.

Thanks to everyone who weighed in on the Code Reads discussion of Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language.”

For the next Code Reads I’m going to continue down the slightly more literary path we trod with Steele and have a look at “Notes on Postmodern Programming,” a paper by James Noble and Robert Biddle from 2002. (The link provides further links to a PDF or Postscript version of the paper.)

It’s both more recent and considerably more offbeat than some of the other stuff we’ve read. I heard the authors present work at OOPSLA in 2004, and I think their in-person style of delivery — well-timed to a rich slide-set and loaded with carefully calibrated ironies — isn’t fully captured in plain text. Nonetheless, it’s a provocative read, and one that offers a good counterpoint to some of the discussions we’ve been having on the woes of the programming field.

I’m now trying to work on about a two-week schedule for these readings, so I plan to post on the “Postmodern” essay some time next week. Happy solstice!

The blog-dimmed tide is loosed!

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The backlash against Web 2.0 in all its manifestations — blogging, Wikipedia, “user-generated content,” citizen journalism and so on — seems to be hitting full tilt.

At the front of this parade, debating anyone he can persuade to share a podium, is Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Keen’s critique has already raised mountains of ire, from people including Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, and Terry Heaton (who calls it “a whining, outrageous and defensive fantasy based on sweeping generalizations, falsehoods, paranoia and a form of condescension so pissy that it blinds the author to anything resembling reality”). I’m still planning to read the book soon and I’ll let you know whether I agree.

Next comes Nick Carr, who’s got a new book heading our way titled The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny. Carr is a contrarian by nature who often takes a cynical view of Web 2.0 phenomena a la Keen, but from what I can tell his book intends a more high-altitude portrait of the transformation of computing from a desktop-centric world to the Web-based universe.

Then there is Michael Gorman, the American Library Association honcho known for his broadsides against “the Blog People.” Gorman turns up this week in a “Web 2.0 Forum” organized by the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has been wrestling with the challenges it faces — intellectual, financial and institutional — in the wake of Wikipedia’s success. Gorman sees the rise of Web 2.0-style interaction ushering in a new dark ages, a “Sleep of Reason” –which, Goya fans know, “begets monsters.”

Keen and Carr are both participating in this forum as well. It couldn’t be that Britannica is stacking its expert deck, now, could it? Perhaps they should invite Kevin Kelly, whose civil but devastating retorts to Keen in this dialogue deserve wider currency. (Clay Shirky is in there, at any rate, handily dismantling Gorman’s self-contradictions.)

In any case, this is an important debate, worth mulling over — however crude some of the original contributions may be — and it’s not going to end any time soon. Early next year, for instance, we’ll get a new book on a similar theme from my Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo (now blogging as Salon’s Machinist). Farhad’s book examines similar questions of authority, trust and credibility in new media as Keen, but he does so less as a culture critic than through the lens of social science and psychology. (I’ve had the pleasure of reading an early manuscript, and though I don’t agree with everything in it, it’s a wonderful read, full of insight and valuable nuggets of research.)

Regardless of how you feel about all these issues, it’s hard to miss one meta-elephant in the room: The members of this phalanx of Web 2.0 cynics have all chosen to deliver their critiques via the very form that their rhetoric detests. Keen promotes his book from his blog. Carr weaves his ideas on his blog. Gorman explains what’s wrong with the “Blog People,” where? On a blog hosted by Britannica.

What’s the thinking here: First join them, then beat them?

However dangerous to the polity the tools of Web 2.0 may be, it seems that they are perfectly well-suited to providing a platform for assaults upon themselves. Which tells me that they may be considerably more resilient, and socially salutary, than their critics allow.
[tags]web 2.0, andrew keen, cult of the amateur, nicholas carr, michael gorman, encyclopedia britannica[/tags]

Code Reads #10: Guy Steele, “Growing a Language”

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Code ReadsThis is the tenth edition of Code Reads, a series of discussions of some of the central essays, documents and texts in the history of software. You can go straight to the comments and post something if you like. Here’s the full Code Reads archive.

You don’t have to read too far into Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language” to figure out what he’s up to. In this 1998 talk on the nature of programming-language design, Steele writes under a set of constraints: he may use any word of one syllable, but if he wishes to use longer words, he must define them first — using only words of one syllable.

Steele aimed to illustrate how awkward and confining it can be to try to express yourself when you don’t have access to an extensive vocabulary: “I wanted to show you want it is like to use a language that is much too small.” (By this point in the talk, he has already defined “language.”) His larger purpose is to advocate a philosophy of programming-language development that aims for neither a small nor a large language, but rather for one that is “designed to grow.”

Such growth is to be propelled not by a closed cadre of gurus but by the language’s users, who have been given an appropriate set of tools to extend the language. The shape of the language is such that these user-generated additions do not look or behave any differently from the “original” elements of the language provided by its initial creators. Nearly a decade later, this argument — which parallels similar ideas that have become popular in the open-source software community as well as in the “user-generated” enthusiasms of Web 2.0 — sounds neither arcane nor controversial.
[Read more…]

Google Reader gets amnesia

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I switched to Google Reader a couple of months ago when I got tired of Bloglines’ habit of forgetting my “unread” posts. Mostly I’ve been happy with it, after the brief period of culture shock.

Today, though, Google Reader suddenly lost my entire list of 100+ feeds. The only feed it still shows is one I added in the last 48 hours or so.

That’s the bad news. A bunch of other posts in the user forum make it sound like the problem is at least widespread, if not universal. The good news is that the Reader team got a post up immediately in the same forum, saying that they’re aware of and working on the problem.

Crossing my fingers…

UPDATE: That was fast. Appears to be fixed now. (Somebody plugged in the power cord — er, database!)

Nice speedy response, anyway. Ironically, this follows a recent post by Scoble about how lame the Bloglines plumber is, and how Google doesn’t need one because Reader never breaks…

[tags]google reader, rss[/tags]

“Intertwingled” quote, nabbed

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In the context of Chandler’s effort to escape the confinement of tree-based models of information organization, I quoted Ted Nelson‘s famous line about “intertwingularity” in Dreaming in Code:

People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

This quotation can be found on many Web pages, bbut when I went to source it for the endnotes, I couldn’t locate the authoritative original statement. I found the same quote in David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous, and — knowing that Weinberger is a scrupulous attributor — I asked him if he knew its original source. He, too, found it hard to pin down, but now reports a definitive answer (courtesy Frank Frank Hecker — more details on Weinberger’s errata page).

It turns out it’s exactly where I first looked for it, in Nelson’s book Dream Machines, the 1987 revision, on page 31. (Nelson only used “deeply” once, the second time; the word doesn’t appear before “hierarchical” in the original — it must have crept in across multiple reuses.)

I spent hours hunting through Nelson’s volume — a reissue of both Dream Machines and Computer Lib in one book, with one starting from the front and the other from the “back”, upside down. I guess I should have looked harder.

On the other hand, my failure to locate the quote might also have been the result of thei books’ unconventional format. These books are true miscellanies, examples of the havoc a fertile mind and a page-layout program (or an X-acto knife) could wreak on the conventions of book design in those heady early days of desktop publishing. (Think of the old Whole Earth Catalog, if you’ve seen that.) Chunks of text are scattered in different typefaces, mixed up with graphs and hand-drawn flowcharts and ALL-CAPS EMPHASIZED TEXT. It is a format designed to frustrate the simple linear quest to attribute a quotation.

This whole tiny story is, in its way, a tribute to the “intertwingularity” of Nelson’s work itself. You have to give the man credit for finding a form that matched the content of his digital-liberation ideas — even when he was stuck using paper.
[tags]ted nelson, intertwingularity, david weinberger, everything is miscellaneous, dreaming in code[/tags]

There is no end

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Since my decision to wrap up Dreaming in Code without a conclusive ending to the Chandler saga left me dealing with complaints (unfair! not true!) that I’d “bailed out,” I have become inordinately obsessed with tracking examples of successful creative works that lack a traditional conclusion.

Students of the epic understand that the classic form of that tradition begins in medias res — and ends that way, too.

Mitch Kapor and Tony Soprano could never be tagged as “separated at birth.” But I’m proud that my little book now has something in common with America’s highest-regarded TV series.

UPDATE: On the other hand, the Sopranos ending left Dave Winer with Post-Traumatic Sopranos Stress Disorder.
[tags]dreaming in code, sopranos[/tags]

Links for June 8th

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  • 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.

Journey to Richistan

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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?

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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]