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Malcolm Gladwell Challenges the Idea of "Free"
An anonymous reader brings us another bump on the bumpy road of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which we discussed a week ago. Now the Times (UK) is reporting on a dustup between Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Recently Gladwell reviewed, or rather deconstructed, Anderson's book in the New Yorker. Anderson has responded with a blog post that addresses some, but by no means all, of Gladwell's criticisms, and The Times is inclined to award the match to Gladwell on points. Although their reviewer didn't notice that Gladwell, in setting up the idea of "Free" as a straw man, omitted a critical half of Stewart Brand's seminal quote.
Summary, n.: a comprehensive and usually brief abstract, recapitulation, or compendium of previously stated facts or statements.
That is exactly what this slashdot post isn't.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Could anyone understand that mess? Is this a book review? If I didn't know that "outliers" was a book, I'd be clicking past.
Does Gladwell also have a problem with the Wikipedia articles that Anderson plagiarized for the book?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
...it just wants to be anthropomorphized.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I love how this guy discovers the obvious and then gets people to buy his books. What is it? His hair cut fools people into thinking he is smart?
The biggest point, in my opinion, that Gladwell makes, is that you still need to find a way to make money. Both sides use the example of youtube, which gives away everything for free. However, they have infrastructure costs of somewhere around $300 million a year, which they haven't been able to cover with advertising. Will they be able to find a way to cover their costs, or not? I don't know the answer to that, maybe eventually.
I think Anderson is kind of stumbling upon a point an MBA told me once, that given enough time, all new technology becomes a commodity. There are a dozen word processors you can choose from, a dozen different types computers, a dozen types of memory to choose from, hundreds of flash game sites (which are free, but 20 years ago people paid real money for games just like those). So for the most part, things will get sold for a little more than the cost to create them (the MBA then went on to tell me a number of different techniques to 'lock in' customers to your product: trapping users with file format was one, there were many other more devious methods, and Microsoft uses many of them. I don't underestimate quality MBAs anymore).
What Anderson is saying is that more and more, marketers will use freeness to suck users in. This is actually common knowledge among marketers, they've been playing with 'free' for years, and they are really excited about it, and talk about it amongst themselves, and to anyone else who will listen. Basically Anderson is right.
What Gladwell is saying is that you still need a way to cover your costs. Basically he is right as well.
They are both right, and what's more, if you asked an MBA about this, they might wonder why you are arguing about such basic ideas. And if you ask nicely, they'll tell you tons more about things you never even thought of.
Qxe4
Throwing your computer off the roof - Because your time isn't free
There are other reasons for throwing your computer off the roof. In the early days of Apple we had a little commercial system based on Apple Pascal that ran on a ][+. It was a true blivit in the classical sense, something sort of written that ran a part of the business until it couldn't anymore.
When we took it to the roof of the building and threw it into the parking lot, someone remarked "That's the longest it's ever gone without a crash". We used 11/70's from that point until they couldn't do the job either, but they were too big to conveniently throw off the roof.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Political analyst Matthew Yglesias over at CAP has a fairly good take on both the book and the review at the CAP web site.
sPh
To try and make a long story short, but not too short:
Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson are, according to the Guardian newspaper, "Two of the world's leading thinkers". A title seemingly obtained from a long career of writing endless books about things no one really cares about, but everyone likes to have an opinion on.
Andeson is the author of a book called, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price", in which he argued that in an age where terabyte drives can be had for less than $100 , and megabytes of data can be whizzed around the tubes in seconds, a story or articles or other pieces of data only a few kilobytes in size can only be worth, well, nothing.
The spat began when , Gladwell, in his review of the book, became a bit, harsh, in his critques of Anderson, calling his arguments "pithy"(sic!) and "uncompromising", and generally regarded Anderson's arguments as lacking in substance(my word!).
Unfortunately, this rather vicious assault came at a time when Anderson was recently caught plagiarising material, and worse from Wikipedia, so he must have felt a need to defend his intellectual honor from Gladwell's slights. He therefore promptly responded with am open letter titled "Dear Malcom: Why so threatened?"
At this point everyone in the playground let out a collective "OOOUUUUHHHHHHHHH!!!" and someone was heard to yell "Fight!". Needless to say, this sort of hubbub is rarely seen in such great intellectual circles, and the social clubs are just brimming with gossip about the scandal.
The Guardian, ever the vigilant reporter of great matters of state, has dutifully brought the matter to the attention of the greater public. In addition, their great commentator Murad Ahmed, has already declared that Gladwell "wins this one on points", which is certain to stir things up a bit.
It's all so exciting! Wouldn't you agree?!
May the Maths Be with you!
Malcolm Gladwell is one of those people, not precisely stupid, but so shallow and lacking in insight that he makes Chris Anderson, who is simply a hack, look brilliant by comparison. Gladwell, lest we forget, specializes in gushing soft journalism pieces on people whom he has designated as "great". He's what I call a Mensa bottom feeder - he produces work for people who like to think about how smart they are, which is not how actually-smart people spend their time.
Gladwell wouldn't know what to do with an actual idea if he had one (I envisage a dog with a great piece of artwork, sort of chewing on it.) Now, Anderson's piece is competent hackery, which is better than most people could do I don't mean this critically, but something about it intersects with the sort of faux-highbrow pablum that Gladwell thinks he understands. This is very threatning to Gladwell - going back to the dog analogy, it's like he's got some glimpse of a world of ideas and there's a threat to him there that he can't really understand. Gladwell is getting good money to stick his nose up Bill Gates' behind and there's an army of other dogs willing to do that for free. So he lashes out in a rage, and since he can dimly percieve Anderson (but not the more interesting and provocative people whose work Anderson has extended), Anderson becomes his target.
Again, I have nothing against a competent hack. But I do have some real criticism for Anderson - seriously, you admire Gladwell?
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
That's funny. Paying $15 for a drink would make you a laughingstock in the social circles I run in.
Sing it with me now!!
"'Cause I've got friends in low places
Where the whiskey drowns
And the beer chases my blues away
And I'll be okay
I'm not big on social graces
Think I'll slip on down to the oasis
Oh, I've got friends in low places
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
My take is that Gladwell is post-peak and he knows it.
Give him a little bit of credit, at least try to address his arguments.
They're both rather accomplished bullshit-pop-sociology writers, but the real disagreement has a lot to do with their style. Anderson is like Tom Friedman and Ray Kurtzweil, in that he is a messianic This Is The Future pop philosopher-type, and tends to construct his argument around absolute, theoretical propositions, and asserts his case as if it were inescapable physical law. He writes like an Austrian Economist or a Straussian. He is a structuralist.
Gladwell is the skeptic. All of his books have mainly focused on picking-apart the assumptions of structuralists; you think entrepreneurs are the movers in an economy, he puts up 10 reasons why it isn't so simple. You think hockey teams always select the best roster of players? Outliers is about how social institutions are highly irrational in identifying the successful. You think people make rational decisions at all? He wrote a book called Blink where he calls it all into question.
I'm not saying he's right, it's just his MO. When he sees a book like Free, that makes Big Important Statements about How All Of Us Order Our Lives, it's bait to someone like him.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.