TEN REASONS WHY I AM ALWAYS SO CRANKY Interval Research Corporation Forum Presentation November 1996 First of all, I have to start by saying that it is not easy to do what I do. Being critical does not come easily to women, in particular, and it has never come easily to me. I sweat bullets every time I do something like this. But I do it because somebody needs to look for cracks in the facade, and to point them out so that maybe someone can avoid them. So even though I get kind of flip about it, being critical of what doesn't work is a big and important part of my job. Thus I would like to present to you the 10 reasons why I am cranky. 1. Infinite Loop(iness)/The Hype Machine "INFINITE LOOPINESS" is what I have so cleverly named the consensual hallucination between the trade magazines, the business press and the very well funded public relations machines of every technology and media company on the planet. Infinite Loopiness has been responsible for the creation of many bogus business plans -- and public stock offerings -- and eventual bankruptcies and layoffs and human career suffering . The infinite loop goes like this: company discovers/invents/steals some technology or other. Visionary founder thinks he's found the equivalent of the Holy Grail, and believes he can mass-produce it ‹ just in time for the next holiday season! He gets venture funding. He hires a PR company. PR company goes to the analysts, "the monthlies" and eventually to the national business press to peddle story of Holy Grail. Within a few months, a new industry based on Holy Grail technology is born. Venture capitalists are funding Holy Grail-wannabe business plans with abandon, and Wall Street is giving them enormous valuations based on their "potential." They go public. The investors make their money back, sell off a pile of stock and the folks they sell it to, start losing their pants. The press starts a backlash to the mania which it helped create, and there you are. If you're lucky, all that money has advanced the state of the art a little bit. But usually this loops you pretty much back to Square One, only with a few million dollars down the drain. I've seen this one go around a few times. When I started writing for Infoworld in 1984, it was ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE that was going to change the world by next Christmas. Later that year, Infoworld asked me to do a story called "The Year of the CD- ROM." I begged Stewart Alsop to assign it to someone else. The next year, when I was at Electronics magazine, it was once again the Year of the CD-ROM. I couldn't get out of writing the story that time. My profound observation, as I recall, was that if I could store a whole lifetime of New Yorker cartoons on a single disk, that would be good enough for me. Later in the 1980s, as Apple started to develop digital-media tools like HyperCard and connect them with videodisk technology, suddenly it was the era of DIGITAL MULTIMEDIA. Then it was INTERACTIVE TELEVISION. Get those pesky computers out of the way! By next Christmas, you'll be able to control the outcome of your favorite soap opera! (Although that didn't work too well for American Cybercast, did it?) Now it's Java and the Internet and the World Wide Web which are going to make the universe safe again for civilization. And it's free! Advertising supported! Such a deal. And next -- no pun intended -- we'll hear that Steve Jobs' new project at Apple is to FINALLY build the transporter room. You KNOW someone would fund that one. And of course, the really important stories no one pays attention to until it's too late. Like in 1986 or 1987, I was reading stories about the "year 2000" software problem. This year, all of a sudden it's big news again. Why didn't somebody fix it back then? Not sexy enough, is my guess. Nobody in the MIS department could fund a $30 million business plan on it. Those 30 million dollar business plans lead me to cranky number two ... 2. The Carpetbaggers: Short Term Thinking Masquerading as Vision This item is cheating a bit because it really is an extension of Infinite Loopiness, but I thought it was worth going into since the problem is epidemic in the interactive media world, and in Internet startups. Carpetbaggers are often -- but certainly not always -- involved with the second-tier, second generation me-too companies -- and the venture firms and investment banks who love them. You know, the ones who say they have the "next Netscape or Yahoo" or some such. Just as often these days, carpetbaggers are also big media conglomerates like Softbank or News Corp., who believe that appearances are as important as substance. If everybody has a Website, they have to have one too. And sure enough, it's gotten to be hilarious to drive around and look at the billboards with URLs on them, or see all URLs in print ads and on TV. So here's how carpetbaggers work: They build a startup team, who they sell on the project by telling them it's a long-term investment for the company, very important strategically, etc., etc., They sell the hell out of the company -- either by getting venture money, corporate investors, advertising or whatever. Sometimes they wait long enough to ship a product, sometimes they don't -- but a few months or a year, when the company hasn't turned profitable on a dime, they either sell it off or fold up their tents and go home -- with whatever cash they've managed to siphon off for thesmelves in the process. Part of the problem is that these companies very often are backing bad ideas in a market that doesn't know how to discriminate, so they can milk it for revenues over a very short period of time. American Cybercast is a great example of this -- "interactive soap operas" would probably be a great idea if YOU guys, for example, applied yourselves to the problem. What makes me mad about companies like American Cybercast is that it was able to get a pile of money for a ridiculous project with no long-term merit -- a fact which was completely obvious by looking at the product, if you were even the least bit connected to your gut reactions. And this while companies like Voyager, who have consistently applied themselves to creating Really Good, Really New Media, have been struggling financially since Day One. I know the Voyager case isn't that black and white, but the fact remains that all other things being equal, they've had the best titles in the business and have had one hell of a time -- in part because they were were so resistant to taking money from carpetbaggers. This whole drill reminds me of a little aphorism that my former boss Norman Pearlstine says: "The flogging will continue until morale improves." Which leads me to Numero Tres on the cranky list: 3. Lack of Critical Thinking/Merge-Purge Mentality Sometimes I think people in this business have completely lost their minds. I consistently see so little good, critical thinking that I actually start to wonder whether it's ME who's insane. I'll start with the big examples and work my way down. Synergy is one of those words that, at this point, makes my teeth itch. An enormous amount of harm has been done in the name of synergy, which is actually just a euphemism for "naked greed and power lust." Synergy is supposed to be the result when a company snookers Wall Street into believing that it will be more powerful and more profitable if it buys up everything in sight that is even remotely connected to its business, usually incurring debt into the billions of dollars. Software companies and media companies create so-called synergistic relationships for two reasons at least: One, as I said, it allows them to amass power. For example, in the media world today, it's suddenly become chic to own a television network, or at least have access to one. In our world, Softbank bought Ziff Davis's computer magazine stable, started ZDTV, and promptly did a joint venture with MSNBC for a show on technology. Time Warner bought CNN. NBC started MSNBC with Microsoft. Murdoch is starting a cable channel, too. Disney bought ABC, and CBS, in a tragic fall from grace, has become a kind of laughing stock by buying a country music channel and a cooking channel or something like that. So they buy up all this stuff and then their debt load is so high that they have to turn around sell them again, usually for a fraction of what they paid for them. The telephone companies also started down this path -- the idea being that if you already own the distribution channel, in their case the telephone wires, that you can make a lot more money if you also own what goes over those wires. This used to be illegal, after the breakup of the Bell System. I've never been able to figure out who paid whom to get Judge Green to reverse THAT part of the final consent decree. The most public of these ventures, a consortium called Tele-TV headed by Howard Stringer, died -in utero-. I still can't figure out what the other one, which is called Americast, is doing. If someone can explain to me these particular exercises in futility, other than the obvious greed-and-power thing, I would LOOOVE to hear it. Because they have yet to be a success in any quantifiable sense, except for the investment bankers who take fees for doing the deals. In the media world, there is a very nasty by-product to synergy. I believe that it is in the process of bringing about the end of independent journalism. Softbank, for example, which is my employer for The Site, owns all the Ziff trade magazines. It also owns Comdex, Interop, Seybold and other trade shows. It is also investing like nobody's business -- even more than Microsoft -- in hardware and software companies. Major conflict of interest. NBC's Tom Brokaw buddies up to Bill Gates in interviews. ABC News not long ago did a 15-minute feature on a new Disney World ride. Of course, all these companies hotly defend their journalistic integrity, and maybe so far, they have been able to cling to it. But no one calls them on individual instances, because anyone who COULD is in the same position. Very sad and scary. Mergers/convergence We do have something to be thankful for: convergence as a buzzword seems to have died off a bit in popularity. But the lack of critical thinking that launched it in the first place is still alive and kicking . Without belaboring the point: I believe it is axiomatic that companies will always be terrible at trying to assimilate other corporate cultures by merging with them. There are countless examples of this over the years: IBM-Rolm, AT&T and every computer company it ever tried to buy, and the infamous Bell Atlantic-TCI deal, which never happened for a reason. Cable operators know how to run a network of coax that is stuck together with baling wire and chewing gum, and delivers piped video signals to televisions. What cable companies know how to do could not be more different than telephone companies, who live and die by reliability, and the ability to measure -- and charge for -- customer usage ... neither of which are part of the cable operator's job. As you may recall, the TCI-Bell Atlantic deal happened at the height of interactive television mania, when every big cable system from TCI to Time Warner to Viacom was preparing two-way TV trials. I felt like I was yelling from the bottom of a well back then, when I kept saying, Wait a minute! Can we think this through? It's HARD to do two-way video. Do you have any idea how long it's going to take to write the software for that? Set up a national network for it? Create the programming? I'll never forget the conversation I had with Geoff Holmes of Time Warner, right after they announced the Orlando trial. He said it would be up and running by April -- and this was in September. At the time, I recall, Silicon Graphics had just signed the deal and put the ad in the Mercury News to hire the engineers. That was a few months before I started hearing the stories about Indigo boxes overheating and melting onto people's TV screens. Which leads me neatly to number four: 4. Unrealistic Expectations/The Denial Machine Because everyone wants to find a mass market for technology products, there has been a race to make people believe that computers and software are easy to use. I am not going to dwell on this for long, but I think it's something that probably applies to a lot of what you are doing here at Interval. The truth is that computers are extremely complex. The early graphical user interface work at PARC was a staggering advancement for ease of use, and what has followed has -- for the most part -- continued to improve the situation. But I wonder what we lose by trying to simplify technology too much, by hiding its complexity. Are we creating a whole new priesthood -- like the mainframe priesthood -- of people who can tell us, "Don't worry, we'll take care of it for you"? Does this defeat the purpose of personal computing -- the empowerment of the individual? I don't know the answer; it's a question. And if you say "yes," what is the effect on culture in the long run? What happens when you dumb-down technology for the masses? This is a question that actually came up as an accusation leveled at me, by a very hot Web programmer that I know. He was at the TV studio the other day and told me he thought it was dangerous that I was always poking fun at how bad search engines are because they give you, like, 30,000 hits in response to a query. He said, "People should learn boolean logic--it's not that hard to put a plus- sign or quotes into a query." I don't know, should they? Is he right, or should the software get smart enough to know what we're asking? It's a question. Technology should certainly be easier, but how easy should we make it? Wouldn't it be better to bring people's knowledge level up a bit? ... Another difficult "reality check" question is about the Internet. The Internet isn't free and it never has been. Someone has always paid. There's been a loophole in telecommuncations law for a while that says data calls aren't subject to long distance fees. But is this fair? And is it realistic, in an environment where we are asking telecommunications companies to compete in what will become the most cutthroat market of the next decade? The Internet isn't free. Sending your mother e-mail in New York isn't inherently any more free than picking up the phone and talking to her there. So why is the net community -- traditionally so libertarian and anarchic -- willing and in fact adamant about continuing what could only be called an entitlement? I don't understand. Another big chunk of denial that I'd like us to blow apart right now is that electronic communication increases productivity, and that the electronic distribution of information is somehow increasing the quality of my life. Information-wise, MY LIFE SUCKS. I get at least 100 e-mails a day. How many new Web sites go up every day? I don't know. I don't even have time to read the Times and the Journal, but I'm constantly bombarded with more and more and more information. Too much input. Everything is moving too fast. At Spotlight last year, Barry Diller gave the closing keynote. It was pretty controversial, but I thought it was brilliant. He talked about process, and about how the speed at which communications and information travel today is not helping us make good decisions. He says speed is the enemy of PROCESS, and I believe he is right. How can we figure any of this stuff out if we don't have time to think? I think some of the decisions and actions we've seen over the past few years already answers that question. The speed at which technology develops, and the speed at which we move to chase it, has also made a great contribution to my next cranky item: 5. We Have to Stop Pretending There's a Forever I've been formulating a new way of thinking about business models over the past few weeks, as a result of ruminating on the absolute chaos in our industry. One of the many things we are witnessing, as we approach the millenium, is the commercialization of everything. Everything becomes a commodity -- including intellectual property. Why do you think they call it "content"? Once Mosaic hit the market, there were a bunch of imitators, almost immediately. Yahoo, the same thing--search engines became an instant commodity. Anyhow, it seems to me that modular software and the PC business becoming a commodity should be leading us to look at business models differently. It seems to me that nowadays, software and hardware companies -- unless you're Microsoft or Intel and own the market -- should be looking at themselves like they are independent movie studios. The realistic business plan -- whoops, is that an oxymoron? -- would say, "I have this product, which works on Holy Grail technology. This is my angle. Based on these sets of variables, I believe we have two viable years to be in business to make $X million dollars." You do that, then you get out and start something else. That's de facto what's happening now, but telling the truth about it would save a lot of people a lot of heartache thinking they've failed or didn't do the right thing, or that they'd made a long-term career decision that turned out to be short-term. Everything in this world is short-term. It just isn't possible, unless as I say you're Microsoft or Intel and you have a huge pile of cash, for a product to stay viable in the market longer than a couple, three years. ... Realism and the bottom line leads me to another thing that drives me nuts, which is number 6 ... 6. Civil Liberties and the Bottom Line I do not understand an industry or a culture which defends its civil liberties only if that defense has financial benefits. The encryption debate in this country focuses not on the rights of people to protect their privacy and security, and the privacy and security of their networks, but instead on the ability of software companies to export their products. Very few companies fought the Communications Decency Act. The only ones who did -- and it was a small percentage of who should have -- fought it because they figured out that censorship of any kind would curtail their ability to sell information, which I hear is the lingua franca of the next decade. In fact, I found this was the only argument I could get people to listen to. In the same way, it's been very hard to convince businesses to protect their customers' privacy on the Internet. The EFF finally got an E-trust program going -- it is starting to sell the idea that protecting personal data on the Internet is a good business decision -- but it has been one tough row to hoe. Business has become the politics of the '90s, where anything that isn't good for MY bottom line isn't good for democracy. This is an incredibly dangerous and slippery slope. And speaking of "if it's good for me, it must be good for democracy," let's take a moment to consider number 7 ... 7. The Microsoft Juggernaut I will keep this brief, and we can talk about it later if you want. I am really sick of hearing everyone kvetch about Microsoft. They complain constantly about it, but then they won't do anything that would actually stop the company from getting more powerful -- like not doing deals with them. Like shipping equally powerful products for Macintosh and Unix at the same time as the same time as they do for Windows. I was going to write a book on how to compete with Microsoft at one point, and I gave up the idea when I realized it should really only be one sentence long: Just Say No. I understand why companies Just Say Yes. Developing for the industry standard certainly is the best way to make the most money. But it seems that enlightened self interest would dictate that the industry work together to take Microsoft down a peg or two. I know it isn't going to happen, but it makes me cranky that Bill Gates has been installed as the dysfunctional father-figure of the computer business, the guy everyone loves to hate but won't actually grow up and separate from. As Ashleigh Brilliant says, "They want all of the power and none of the responsibility." Microsoft's enormous investments in interactive media, such as they are, are a kind of rough segue into my next peeve, which is Number 8 ... 8. Interactivity: Technology Masquerading as Customer Value I don't know about you, but I look at the enormous amount of dreck out there that is calling itself interactive media and I get heart palpitations. Give ME the money! Let ME make it! I can do better than 90 percent of that stuff. And why is that? Why do I think that I could do better? Because I do not have preconceived notions about what interactive media is. I LOVE your New Voices, New Visions contest. Please please please keep doing it. It is one of the only places in the world where I see people doing fun, interesting things with the technology. I remember way back in 1990, when I was working with Jonathan Seybold and David Baron on Digital World, David came up with the name of a panel called "Not a Book, Not a Movie" that was our attempt to start defining this new genre. But what have we got? Interactive books. Interactive movies. Interactive magazines. Interactive TV broadcasts. American Cybercast? Streaming video? People Magazine Online? Kill me now! I don't know how to define interactive media, but I know it's not that stuff. I do know that in order for something to be truly interactive for me, to feel like I am part of the flow, I actually have to BE part of the flow. So ... on the Web, I choose links that take me where I ask them to (for the most part). Destination aside, I am driving the bus around the world. I know you're all familiar with Donna Hoffman's work about flow on the Web, and I buy it. The pleasure I get from flow is why I do not believe that Microsoft or any other companies' attempts to balkanize the Web -- by limiting choices to MSN's content -- will work in the long run. It misses the point. When it comes to information online, what "interactive" means is that you give me the power to control my experience, which is usually by allowing me to configure some kind of filter function. The pleasure experience is different for everyone in this space, I believe, depending on what we are looking for. In fact, that is why Amazon.Com is such a success. You want something. You look for it. You find it. You buy it. I don't think Amazon needs to link up with any of the content it has on the site now--just the simple action of being able to order books online would be sufficient, I'm sure. Casting an eye toward value to the consumer, to the customer, just doesn't seem to occur to most interactive media companies. Certainly it hasn't made much progress in the entertainment world, which continues to be one of the most elusive interactive media forms. And I don't see much hope that the industry is getting a clue. Some of the stuff I like is surprising, even to me. But the stuff I've seen that I think is fabulous are visual MUDs and MOOs. To me, these DEFINE interactive storytelling -- because I am an absolutely critical element in making the story happen. I'm not talking about avatar-based chat, like the stuff Onlive Talker does. That's pretty cool, but I'm sure that "community" is overrated as a product concept. I suspect that people who spend a lot of time chatting, in particular, are the same kinds of people who go for home shopping on QVC. But products like Meridian 59, which got bought about a year ago by 3DO, are so totally cool. Not only are we in the world, interacting with each other, but we have a plot and a scene and some "virtual actors" to bump up against and deal with. It's like Habitat with context. Other than that, I have been appalled by the lack of attention that people pay to what is compelling. Maybe it's an education problem. Maybe if media people really understood technology instead of being starry- eyed about it, they would look at it as a means instead of an end. Maybe if technology people understood literature and story and culture on a more fundamental level than they do now, they would see the value of engaging people rather than plugging in "content elements." We could go on and on about this. And in fact, I'll be teaching a class at Stanford next quarter where we will try to define a new critical literature for analyzing interactive media. I'm pretty sure I'll get a Website up about it, and maybe you all can participate. And in many ways I think education is really the key to a lot of what makes me cranky, which leads me to number 9 ... 9. Education/Locking the Prodigy in the Attic After a few years of looking at all this stuff, a realization has been creeping up on me and I cannot figure out what to do about it. It's really depressing. I have realized that the very best stuff I've ever seen, interactive media-wise, was educational stuff. And it was stuff that was done 'way back at the beginning of multimedia -- back in the Apple Multimedia Lab days. Back in the early days of Voyager. Back when Bob Abel did his brilliant Guernica project. I remember one Saturday afternoon, just after I started Digital Media, being cranky about having to work and especially cranky because I was going to have to review this Voyager disc called Exotic Japan. I couldn't have cared less, right? Three hours later, I looked up and almost dropped my teeth. And I learned stuff about Japanese culture that I've never forgotten. Okay, so maybe it's not such a big deal that you are supposed to eat sushi with your fingers, NOT with chopsticks, but I didn't know that, did you? So why is education software treated like it's subhuman or something? We pretend like it's just as important -- we sure give it a lot of lip service -- but its market is always so limited. I read a review somewhere of a movie where once again, the nerd kid is someone who you feel sorry for. Our culture hates intelligence and people who use their intelligence, so I guess it's no wonder that all the big money goes to American Cybercast, while Voyager finally has to pull the plug. But it makes me sick. And if there's something we can do about this, some way we can get this stuff on the Web, get people to look at it, pay for it like they pay for movies and music, show them that learning is great and good -- well, that would make me a lot less cranky. And I'm not talking about making learning FUN. Learning isn't fun. It's hard work, and it should be hard work, but the rewards are much greater than anything that Hollywood has ever delivered to me on a screen that's big or small. Which leads me to my final point, number 10 ... 10. Diss(ing) Information I've been trying to come up with a theme for this year's Spotlight conference. I've been trying a bunch of stuff on for size -- you know, it's kind of a squirrelly market and I'm sure people are starting to get impatient for it to "happen," as they say. I'd been playing around with stuff like Great Expectations ... What Works ... Brass Tacks ... Get Real. None of them were really clicking for me. And then, while I was in Palm Springs on Tuesday, in a meeting with our graphic designers, the line "Hurry up please itıs time" went through my mind. I remembered it was from a T.S. Eliot poem, and jotted it down to think about when I got home. So a couple of nights ago, I was doodling around, trying to figure out how to approach my talk here, and I thought of it again. went to Alta Vista and typed in the phrase--in quote marks, of course. Up came a few hundred T.S. Eliot references, but about fourth down was a link, "The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot." And there it was. The whole poem. I don't know why, but I got choked up by this -- this storm of generosity that the Web delivered to me, sitting in my dark little office at 1 o'clock in the morning. I felt like I was warming my hands at not only the fire of human knowledge, but the fire of human endeavor. Somebody had to put that up there, somebody had to care enough to make sure that T.S. Eliot was on the Web. Why do we appreciate this so little? Why is the idea of entertainment so much more important to us than information, than access to knowledge, than inspiring people to follow their curiosities and obsessions? Are all our machinations for interactive media -- as defined by the big guys, not the little ones -- just fiddling while Rome burns? Mass-market entertainment is so cheap and shallow, compared to what we would accomplish by inspiring people to learn or even just keep creating. As Justin Hall says, the Web ain't mass media. It's a medium for the masses. Watching what inspires them -- and what they do with that inspiration -- inspires me. On the days when I'm feeling metaphysical about it all, I cling to the hope that all the hubris and idiocy that surrounds us could well be the dying cry of dinosaur companies. I hope that their bones will make the shale that fuels the next generation of artists, whether they make money at it or do it just for sheer joy. And even as cranky as I am, that is why I stay in this business. Thanks for letting me come here.