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The Innovators' Ball
Babylon Rocker writes "Latest Cringely: The Innovators' Ball: Why Business Isn't as Fun as it Used to be.
'Sharp business is cheating and not getting caught.'"
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My father is a very moral man, who taught me early on that winning isn't the point in life. In fact, if "winning" is your only goal, you will never win.
He would tell me stories, like the time he quit his high school water polo team after the coach encouraged his team to elbow the opposing team whenever the ref looked away.
My father's tech company was stolen away from him in the same way as in this artical. He and several friends created a start up, and within a few years, all were shut out of the company, and the investors walked away with the prefered stock.
Companies like Microsoft practice an odd form of amorality and defend it as good business practice. It might be sound business practice, but there is nothing good about it.
Admittedly, in any capitalist society there is a dog-eat-dog quality to business, but is there really the need to specifically crush upstart companies, play fast and loose with public standards to kill competition, and other such underhanded techniques that are only good for your company, but bad for everyone else.
In the end, I think most people who were raised with a firm and grounded set of morals appriciate that there is such a thing as good business practices. I try my best to stay abrest of those companies that follow them and only give them my business. It's hard sometimes, but in the end, it might be the only way some businesses can be made to behave.
What's happened is that the implementor (Joe Shmoe, lets say) has been confused with the inventor.
Few people invent radically new devices. As the cliche goes, the cell phone was invented in 1954, and yet putting a camera on a cellphone, two existing inventions together is called 'innovation'. Yeah, a cell phone with a camera was something new, but so was the first zipper painted blue! Lots of things are 'new', but only because they are simply the result of the millions of ways of combining all the technology we have. Something *truely* new, not just a recombination of things that have already existed, or an existing technology in a different shape, size, color, etc, comes along far less often than the patent office records or brochure claims of corperations will have you believe.
"Old man yells at systemd"
In the US at least, shady inventors have a long tradition dating back to Thomas Edison, whose patent trickery and idea-stealing is somewhat legendary (he even invented the electric chair to make the competing A/C current look dangerous).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Actually, there's some substance to that.
I understand that, at the time Clippy emerged, he was the only development that had its origins in Microsoft Research, something which they were mighty embarrassed by (and which was not really their fault).
This is the modern buisiness environment.
... themselves.
.
If you're a programmer, engineer, or even a doctor, you're just worker. You don't matter except as an "overhead" figure.
The people that do matter don't actually produce anything, the lawyers and the CEO's, they try to see how little they can pay the "overhead" while still meeting various buisiness benchmarks(production, PE ratios, etc). Then they give the lionshare of profit to
They enroll employee's in HMO's that are cheap so they can give that money as bonus to themselves for increasing the company's profits
They play fast and loose with the company savings funds and give themselves a share of that for being "innovative".
Even if it bankrupts the saving fund. The bonus still stands.
More and more the american worker is just dirt that's tilled for whatever it can produce. And it's given the same consideration as dirt. Buisiness leaders paint Unions as greedy for wanting raises that keep pace with inflation, health care benefits that can be actually used, and decent working conditions.
All while these same leaders tear the buisiness apart trying to squeeze everything they can personally take from it.(how many times do we see the CEO that led a company into Chapter 11 getting million dollar bonuses or golden parachutes as a reward for their sterling effort)
And they've made the laws and rules dealing with buisiness so convoluted that only someone who's never learned ANYTHING but buisiness can hope not to be screwed. There's nothing corporations love more than screwing over the neophyte who thinks just because they created something they should make money from it. (this story, Spiderman the movie, Forrest Gump)
Why does this happen? Because big buisiness makes all the rules, if the rules say they can't win, they have them changed. Or they just ignore them and "settle" if it goes bad, with a mandatory non-disclosure agreement of course.
MPAA, RIAA are on a war against illegal profitless file trading. Why is it illegal? Because they had the laws changed to MAKE it illegal. We sit through sanctimonius ads about "doing the right thing" and respecting the artists, the actors, and the industry workers.
While at the same time those corporations "settle without admitting wrong doing" illegal price fixing on music CD's, and they're telling the creator of Spiderman and the writor of Forrest Gump that the movies didn't make a profit so they, the creators, get NOTHING.
But they insist everyone else be ethical about respecting IP laws that THEY wrote.
It all comes down to what you consider to be the reason the company is in
business. Is it to benefit the owners, the managers, the employees, the
customers, or the community in which the business resides? While there can
be more than one reason, one of those reasons must be larger than the
others.
Public companies are supposed to benefit their owners though we've seen a
lot of stockholders burned lately by companies where the managers seemed to
come out on top. Great companies are supposed to put customers first, but
will they do so at the expense of profits? And community, whether it means
my town, my country, or the environment, is usually last of all.
I have no answers, only questions.
All the best,
Bob
This signature has Super Cow Powers
You nailed it.
"Capitalism" has always been about "beating" the other fellow under the Marquis of Queensbury Rules.
You "beat" him by being better than he, by serving your customers better, by getting your product to market faster, by doing what it takes within the bounds of good sportsmanship.
It's the kind of thing where at the end of the day, your competitor looks at you, KNOWS you've "beaten" him, and grudgingly tips his cap to you.
Instead, today we have people cutting each others entrails out to feed to the sharks. At the end of THIS day, you look at the one who has beaten you, and wonder if you know someone who knows someone who can put out a hit contract on the guy's firstborn son.
We are living in a "post-Christian" society, and this is the result. Ego is god.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.