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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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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!
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"
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.
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
That's not capitalism. It's dirty business. And what Cringely calls "sharp business" isn't sharp business, it's sharp dealing. Sharp dealing, the way my grandfather used to use the term...as in, "He's a sharp dealer." It's not a nice thing to say about somebody.
Capitalism means that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door (grossly simplified, I know). It does not mean that it's open season on your competitors to do whatever you can to get them out of the market. What Cringely described in the first half of his article may not have been legal, but don't confuse it with capitalism. It was dirty business, nothing more, nothing less.
And usually I hold what Cringely says at arm's length, but his second to the last paragraph, the one about innovation is, at least to me, right on the mark. I almost can't stand the word anymore.
-h-
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).
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.
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.