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Hack This, Please
Andy Kessler, the author of Wall Street Meat had a recent piece in the WSJ, and now reprinted on his own site. It's a piece about how companies are shifting much more to "hacker" friendly models. It's a particular area of interest for me, as it's something that I've talked about with the folks at BCG for a while.
The hacker hostile business methods of cue:cat and iOpener sure helped those companies... helped them disappear!
I dunno where you are getting this. These models still don't give me the time of day! Even after I tell them I'm a hacker! They just stand there looking all aloof and beautiful. Maybe I just haven't run into the new kind yet.
he preliminary results of the BCG/OSDN survey reveal that:
* Participants note extremely high levels of creativity in their projects.
* Having fun, enhancing skills, access to source code and user needs drive contributions to the Open Source community. Defeating proprietary software companies is not a major motivator.
* The Open Source community is truly global in composition with respondents coming from 35 countries.
* Most participants dedicated at least 10 hours per week in their shared programming efforts
* Contrary to popular belief about hackers, the open source community is mostly comprised of highly skilled IT professionals who have on average over 10 years of programming experience.
more like software dev models. You know, feasibility, plan, design, make, test, support etc.
I recall one of Steve Jobs' big failures. He created an "ultimate remote control" that did everything but get your beer for you. It was a massive failure. Why? Too complicated. People didn't want an infinitely programmable remote control.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"Every business can and should hire a hack and set him loose on their stuff..."
It seems to me, most companies already have one. The usual title is CEO.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
in implying the the customers at large wish to hack products. We (yes, I'm including myself) are a minority, though numerous.
Where the average customer can win is through the end products of hacking. Third party ring tones and games, etc for cell phones are passe now. So are "performance chips" for engine control modules. Third party hacks and add-ons for other embedded systems, like PVRs are here or on the way. In one way or another, all of these are the result of 'hacking' and have direct benefit for the non-hackers.
This is how many companies see the word hacker. Ill things come to mind. They think of all the money they spend to prevent hackers from altering anything in the company. There are a few companies that put hacks in on purpose, but these companies are, as I said, few and far between. With all of the people now that use computers, it seems only an inevitablilty. Open Source programs are the ultimate hack. You can change anything on it you like, and the best part is, it is legal to do so under the GPL. We need more companies that cherish the GPL. I mean, there are plenty of companies that have survived, and profited greatly off of these designs. Red Hat, need I say more? If the initial product is good, they will make their money.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
I hacked my toaster to only burn the toast. It's not *exactly* what I wanted, but I did it ALLLL by myself.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
Instead of simply configuring your PC to suit your needs, you buy some exotic pieces of hardware to do the very same tasks but the hard way.
While I don't mind versatility, things should not be sold to do something different from what they were designed for.
The Rockbox software (http://rockbox.haxx.se)
has incorporated some nifty things that the company, Archos seemed to have left out
Currently, it can:
-play movies on it's screen
-alter the playing speed of MP3s
-use bookmarks, different fonts, and more
-and just recently there are "voice fonts" where the entire menu system is read back to you. There are a decent number of blind rockbox users, and this makes it the only mp3 player they can use. Ever see a blind person use an ipod? This customization alone is something that most blind people would pay upwards of 10-20x the cost of a device to be implemented!
And with Amazon selling the 20GB USB2.0 recorders for $79 after a rebate I don't know where you can get a better deal!
-eric
The last line of the article summarizes it all with one line: "mass customization". It's the next step after mass consumption, with the added benefit that the buyer is in control of getting a truly unique product.
The article explores a way to achieve this through software, but there are many more ways to pull it off. For example, a sport shoes company has a corporate website in which you order a customized pair of sneakers, allowing you to change a lot of details (there are more than 8 colors in 10 items, IIRC, plus other items with fewer choices).
The old idea (mass consumption) was that you buy whatever fits your lifestyle, that you could really define yourself through buying a different mix of products from different brands. The new idea (customization) is that you keep the same brand but you adapt it to your lifestyle. The advantage (for the company) is that you don't need to look for another brand if you don't like such and such feature, and (for you) that you have a more unique product.
Though as several companies start having it, customization won't guarantee success either. It will probably become necessary but clearly not sufficient. You will always see a real-life version of "attack of the clones" when teenage girls roam the mall in packs clothed exactly the same (who probably won't use customization as much). And you will always see "open-architecture" platforms fail miserably (e.g. 3DO).
I would venture that this is a good thing after all, because it gives the control back to the buyer. If you really want to be different, you have to do a bit of thinking and research yourself, instead of relying on what the company tells you is new/hip/unique but sells in thousands.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
He referenced several lawsuits involving this idea...one in particular regarding aftermarket garage door openers.
I've always asked the question "Why can't I change how long the snooze button silences the alarm?" My clock has a 9 minute snooze...but what if I just want 6 minutes? I'd have to keep buying clocks and find the right one through trial and error. I'd be totally willing to pay more for a clock with a variable snooze.
I have the Linksys WRT54g. There are currently 3 groups creating custom firmware. The fixes and features are rolled out quite a lot faster than Linksys provides. I feel that I have one of the most powerful wireless routers on the market for around $80 now. The bandwidth management and remote VPN features are sweet. Linksys would have never implemented that.
I always wondered why a few engineers don't create an open source hardware solution. I imaging a wireless router isn't more than a few chips laid down on a board. A group should get together and create an open-source hardware platform and then sell it at a slight margin to make up the manufacturing costs. Then let the software gurus continue to add features. Just make sure that the unit has enough ram and MIPS to process future functions. I'm not sure of the BOM cost for a wireless router, but I'm sure it's pretty cheap. An open source hardware router could probably sell for $20 when massed produced. There are 802.11b routers selling that cheap now.
--
Check out tons of hot deals updated in real time from many major deal sites.
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
I think that encouraging the "hacking" of your products, or not actively discouraging, helps to develop very dedicated fans (see Tivo). It also give people who have the desire and skills to modify the equipment a greater sense of ownership and/or control of THIER device. As a side benfit it allows a company to effectively outsource a portion of the R&D effort to actual customers. A nice cheap way to find out what people want. If they then incorperate these hacks into future models the the "I want it to just work crowd" can benfit too.
Shouldnt we have laws protecting people who want to modify something they own? Aslong as theres no danger to other people (eg screwing up your cars breaking system), you should be allowed to do what ever the hell you want with your property. Insead we get laws like the DMCA which companies now use on a daily basis to sue people for pretty much anything from making an adaptor cable to spray painting their PS2 silver. I think the mandate should be: "sell us what we want, or we will go and buy it from china"
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I love my iPod, but the most frustrating thing about it is what it could do if Apple allowed people to hack them. For instance, thanks to all the mix CDs and compilations I own, I have over 1700 unique artists in my MP3 collection. Of those, only about 500 have more than one song and only 300 artists have more than 3-4 songs. On the iPod, that means I have to scroll through 4 one-track artists for each of the artists that I own an entire album of. It would be great to have a second "Popular Artist" list that would only show the artists that have more than 3-4 tracks. For a coder, something like that would be easy to write. But because Apple doesn't allow iPod hacking, I'll probably never see that feature. How many other great features are our mp3 players, DVD players, microwaves, automobiles, etc missing becuase people can't hack them? I think one could apply the same argument to Microsoft: what nifty OS features aren't we seeing becuase the only vision of OS we see is the MS vision?
I'd have to agree with this guy. There are a lot of people out there that want to hack things to worth the way they want them too. And with education levels of everyone rising, it will only be a matter of time before the younger generations want to modify things. Take for example, the mobile phone, which five or ten years ago was just a phone. Most of the younger generation likes to modify and change their mobile.
The biggest problem with this idea is that allowing your product to be easily changed by the end user is a recipe for technical support disaster. That's why every branded PC you buy these days doesn't just come with a disk to reinstall the OS, it comes with a "System Restore" CD. So that when you call Dell, HP, Gateway, eMachine, etc. with a problem, they walk you through the few simple things to determine if it is a hardware or software problem. As soon as they feel they can eliminate a hardware failure, the next suggestion is use the restore CD, simply because they can't afford to spend the time trying to figure out what you did to your PC to mess it up.
If your toaster becomes deliberately (by the manufacturer) "hackable" then they can no longer have those big warnings that tinkering with the device voids the warranty, and they will also have to hire a massive support group to get all those messed up toasters working again.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Companies have a much stronger interest in preventing, not encouraging, end-user modification of their products. This is because they want to charge you for extra features and upgrades. Consider one of the most obvious and prevalent examples of computer hardware hacking (which the authors failed to mention although I am sure it was in their minds): CPU overclocking. Intel has no interest in making it easy for you to buy one of their inexpensive CPUs and making it run like one of their premium CPUs with no benefit to them. To the contrary, their entire pricing model is based on charging you extra for those capabilities.
Yes, there is the occasional product that gains geek cult status because the manufacturer encourages end-user hacking (e.g., Lego Mindstorms). But those products are already aimed at that particular segment of the market. Makers of mass-market electronics, on the other hand, have no interest in letting you upgrade their products when they would much rather sell you the upgrade.
There are two primary reasons that are holding back major corporations from opening their goods to hackign. The first is liability, the second is money.
Concerning liability, companies are rightly paralyzed with fear that they could be held responsible for making a product that can be modified to do illegal and/or unpleasant things. Take, for example, the TiVo situation. Just because they took out the ad-skipping feature by default, doesn't mean that they cannot theoretically be held responsible for allowing their product to be hacked in such a way to put the feature back in. And hacking cars is even more legally dangerous. In short: while corporations ensure that their goods meet the requirements of current legal code, there is no way to ensure that a hacked product will still be in compliance. It is highly likely that corporations can be held liable for this.
Second: corporations exist to make money. The reason that most companies don't want their product to be hacked is that they don't want you to find that feature for yourself, they want to find it first and sell it to you. If you add a feature they didn't sell you, they lose. There is a way around this, fortunately, and Apple has already taken it. Simply reserve the right to include and market any hacks that consumers come up with. But finding the hacks that would have market value is hard enough: finding the hacks with market value that are legal is even harder.
For some reason there was no hole at the front, so a cut a hole... just now I relized that they must be girls underwear!
Racing *was*, and occasionally *is still* a major source for automotive innvations to control a car at high speed. Hacks like this are the modern equivalent for non-racing items. Play with it break it, see if you can make it better.
meh
I think it was bad business decissions that made them go broke. Had nothing to do whether or not they allowed people to hack their products. Giving away free hardware and trying to sell a subscription service is plain stupid. If they allowed people to hack their product, people wouldn't have bought service.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Well, not ENTIRELY baffled. It's about stupidity and money. But in principle I'm baffled.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
No, more like:
:P
1.) Scout out new and promising products created by indie programmers;
2.) Buy them, lock stock and barrel, for as cheap a price as you can get away with;
3.) Mod the software just enough to break compatibility with anything other than the Latest and Greatest Windows Product;
4.) Release the marketing hounds;
5.) Get Microsoft-friendly press types to bray about how "innovative" the product is and why you should run out and buy it;
6.) Profit!
Everything from MS-DOS to Front Page, Visio, Halo and VirtualPC have been bought and corrupted this way. It's the Microsoft way. They do not "innovate" in-house. They need other people to do their "innovating" for them.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Seems like a good place for a plug. :)
Hacking TiVo: The Expansion, Enhancement, and Development Starter Kit, available for $20.99 at amazon.com.
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
So much so, the new replacement for the Saxo, the Citroen C2 GT has been designed so that enthusiasts can modify the car (and keep the warranty). there has even been talk of owners being able to share ECU maps and so on to have different performance characteristics. It is not a WRX fast car - but has been designed for the high-risk-insurance youngsters who want to modify their vehicle. It looks like some big consumer goods companies are beginning to look this way and let the end user tinker with the original format to make something unique and match the end users requirements.
rapiddescent (who owns a modified WRX turbo)
You left out several pieces:
-- Don't get it completely right until the third version; but let the customer pay for your development alpha and beta releases.
-- Wrap the code in an air- and watertight EULA that is enforced by half the lawyers in the state of Washington (all under retainer to MicroSoft).
-- Undermine, buy, or crush any other company that has a product that slightly smells of your precious product (even it it IS better).
Yep. That looks like their recipe for success.
Just think about it: A personal computer is not a box that exists to DO something. It's a box that exists purely to be customized to do whatever the user wants.
Look how THAT caught on.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way