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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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If I can beg a little impartiality from the Slashdot editors, must every story include a dig at me or my company?
It's not just the few like Enron that get onto the front pages, it's all the other businesses that it never quite seems to be worth anyone's while to bust (but damn well should be!) There are several extremely obvious examples in IT (cough*MS*cough*SCO*cough), to the extent that reading /. or any of the techy press it's hard not to see most of the industry as riddled with corruption, and I'm sure the same is true in other areas of business.
The thing is, I bet there are a lot of cases where one or two bad guys not necessarily right at the top can turn a whole company crooked (or at least semi-crooked) just because everyone else is too apathetic - or frightened - to shop them.
Of course, when the crooks really are at the top then it really sucks.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Most inventions were based on some innovation or the other - the IC was an innovative usage of the transistor, the microwave an innovative usage of UV, etc.
As Newton opined "If I have seen further, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants" I've created/invented software that I'm proud of and others might term innovation - what's so wrong with innovation anyway?
RTFA, invent != innovate
No. Sharp business is 'cheating' while following the letter of the law. What he is describing is 'Sharp Criminal Conduct' which some business people and many politicians engage in. When the politicians engage in 'Sharp Criminal Conduct' they make it easier for those engaging in 'sharp business' to do really foul things without actually breaking any laws. It's a subtle, but important difference and worth remembering next time you vote.
From the article, immediately before your excerpt:
Innovators have wiggle room. They can steal ideas, for example, and pawn them off as their own. That's the intersection of innovation and sharp business.
Hmmm, steal someone else's ideas and pawn them off as original. Sounds like Microsoft to me!
Decent article, but regarding this part:
We've gone from following the rules to playing the odds.
And if we do follow the rules and don't play the odds, then we are figured to be suckers.
Speak for yourself. Some of us just keep doing the right thing as best we can, no matter what everyone else is doing. We usually come out better in the long run.
everything in moderation
I think you and Cringeley are making the same point. M$ has just repackaged and changed these ideas in a way they can profit from but which doesn't necessarily add much value. Cringeley is suggesting that had they created the first operating system it would have been an "invention", rather than an "innovation", which he regards as smaller and generally less worthwhile/reputable. Semantics, I know, but I think the two of you are coming from the same place on this one.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
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.
My term is 'gaming the system'. When you exploit loopholes and bend rules, you defeat the purpose and intent of a system, thus ensuring that even if you believe the system in theory should work as intended, it won't.
Some people assume if you end up with the desired goal of the system (wealth), than it has served its purpose. In reality, the system was devised not so an individual can become rich, but rather so we have a set of rules in which to facilitate improving our standard of living without resorting to social friction and unfair (subjective, I realize) treatment of others.
All the market tactics, advertising ploys, and accounting/legalese rule bendings seem to weaken the role of merit in capitalism. And I know what constitutes 'merit' is subjective, but I'd rather not give merit to those creative and smart enough to figure out how to bend rules in their favour without being caught.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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"
My recommendation is to raise money from people who already know or trust to some degree whenever possible, and ALWAYS, I repeat, ALWAYS, worry about control. Control is often times far more important than who has how many shares. Shares can very often end up worthless at the end of life of a business venture, if it is liquidated, or M&Aed away, or basically has any end-game other than an IPO, unless your shares are all on a level basis (this is a nice thing about flat LLC memberships and S Corporations as business entities, though that's certainly not necessary).
Just remember that you have to make sure that all your contracts and legal structure reinforce your power and control, and it's often better to give up some extra equity in exchange for this. Be careful who you trust. And never make yourself unnecessary before you have your exit strategy well on its way to execution.
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
I'm not completely sure, but I think they created that stupid paperclip thingy in Word. At least I've never seen anyone else take credit for it.
Now this is a bit ridiculous. Business is a game where the winners turn a profit- which is to say, sell things for more than they are "worth," where "worth" is what these things actually cost to produce. Thus, business is not nice and never has been- hence Jesus with the money-changers, prohibition against usury, Medieval Jewish banking, anti-semitism, Shakespeare, Dickens, Marx, Steinbeck... the list goes on, defining massive areas of history, especially in the Christian world.
Cringely wants no part of that sleaze. He's a geek and a PBS writer instead.
For a while, it looked like people could be geeky and ethical while still turning a profit. This was a temporary illusion caused by a populace that had a religious awe of geeks, caused mostly by FUD, and was willing to overpay even those geeks who didn't really turn the screws. The middle managers who forked over millions of dollars (which THEY had scammed from others) for their own electronic replacements were not making headlines during the late nineties, but there were more of them than there were techie nouveau riche.
So. Every geek, and indeed every human, must ask him or herself whether to try to profit by bringing misfortune to others, or whether to embrace poverty, in the unlikely hopes that that will make the world a better place. I don't have an answer to that for myself, let alone for everybody, but claiming that the sky is falling just because the tech bubble burst months ago is worthy only of ridicule. It is good for anyone, even slashdotters, to be reminded of these Big Questions; but all in all, I think Cringely and most of the rest of this crowd are in way over their heads.
Will Warner geocities.com/wtw0308
The point of the article was that innovation was a corporate metaphor for playing politics, cheating and stealing, and invention was just invention. He said that Microsoft was an innovator, not an inventor.
This is my sig.
Business isn't fun for inventors and creative people because it is impossible for a creative person to bring an idea to production within a bureaucracy.
This is because we allow office politics to completely absorb every single moment of every single day in "corporate" businesses.
There is absolutely no concern for a quality product or a truthful discussion of the right and wrong ways to build something in the cubicles. It's who can fuck who over so they can keep their job while simultaneously destroying someone else's career. It's who can point out the most failures. It's who can foster the most suspicion and doubt about their colleagues' competency that succeeds in the never-ending schedule of meetings.
And nobody ever talks about it. Nobody ever squarely points out the enormous amount of time and money that is wasted, man-hour to man-hour, by people building spectacular layers of redundancy to cover every possible and several impossible failure possibilities while attempting to answer the unanswerable questions posed by middle management.
These are the same people by the way, who insist on everyone being a "team player." Of course, that only applies when these people are the quarterback, not the left tackle.
Want to know where the largest source of waste in business is today? This is it: office politics. People working against each other instead of working as part of a team which actively encourages people to grow and succeed. It's a disgrace and it shouldn't be allowed to continue.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
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).
I don't know about you, but I read /. for the discussions, not the articles. If a bad article inspires great discussion, who cares about the article?
(-1, offtopic)
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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's not a lock, as such. More like an electric fence; you /can/ cross it, if you want to, but it's going to be unpleasant and while the grass might be greener on the other side it's still just about edible over here.
There are problems with ditching Windows: while OOo etc. make it fairly easy to ditch Office these days it's harder to ditch Outlook if your customer insists on your having an MS Exchange server to sync business appointments etc., and although it can probably be done with a minimum of Windows machines and everything else running codeweavers plugins to Evolution it's just so much less hassle to keep running Windows. (There isn't actually much economic sense in ditching it as it's so difficult to get bare metal PCs in the first place: businesses have already paid the Microsoft tax.)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
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
One real problem is rewarding executives for volatility, rather than profits. We need long holding periods on insider stock, maybe five years. That way, if you do a startup, you don't get to cash out for five years, by which time it's clear whether the profits are real. The holding period used to be two years; it was changed to six months in the mid-1990s. Look what happened.
Pay for volatility encourages dumb merger and acquisition activity. Most mergers turn out to be a long-term lose for the stockholders, but a short-term win for management. Management needs to be on the hook for long-term losses.
Executive pay should be set by the stockholders. Each stockholder puts on their proxy how much the CEO's total compensation should be, and the share-weighted median is used. Executive pay is up by a factor of several hundred since the 1950s, even after inflation adjustment. Third-rate CEOs of money-losing companies are making multimillion dollar salaries. Executive pay decisions should pass through the ultimate owners, who are typically people with money in pension funds.
Those two changes alone would cut out considerable dumb financial activity.