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Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing
An anonymous reader writes "Since Wired's Jeff Howe coined the term in 2006, 'crowdsourcing' has been a buzzword in the tech industry, and a business model on the rise. 99designs.com is a site that hosts design contests for small businesses requiring relatively smaller design projects. Anyone can submit their near finished pieces of work to the contests, but only one winner gets paid. Forbes covers just why established graphic designers are so angry at this business model's catching on."
Acting as a middleman between business owners and graphic designers, the 99designs site hosts contests in which clients post their needs--website design, logos, print packages--and designers compete to fill them. Instead of bidding for the job, designers submit finished work tailored to the client specifications in the contest listing.
Anyone who is stupid enough to spend their valuable time crafting something like this for someone they've never met, without guarantee of payment, deserves to both waste their time and not be paid. Unfortunately, spec work hurts everyone involved. The client usually ends up getting something that really just isn't right, the designer usually doesn't get a job or any follow-up work, and by doing spec work, the value of that industry's services is diminished because new clients think they can just throw their criteria out there and get free results.
http://www.no-spec.com/ is a great resource that addresses the topic in detail from many different angles.
You can say whatever you want, but that doesn't make it your business. It's popular these days, and wrong, to presume that everybody should have a say in how CEOs are paid.
Obviously you view the world through the Marxist lens of "class", whatever that really means, so there isn't much hope.
I do appreciate the lessons in civil discourse from a poster who refers to an entire swath of society as "twits" and "assholes" though. Thanks!
So "freedom" means taking from the rich and giving to the poor until everybody has exactly the same stuff.
Money = power, there's no getting around that, so this is what you're talking about. Exceptions, of course, for the Dear Leaders who have the great responsibility of making sure that everything is doled out "fairly", for their own definitions of "fairly" of course, which would never be self-serving. For some reason, people who seek power over others via government are always altruistic and generous, even though they're spending other people's money, while those who make free transactions with others for their labor are exploitative. Sure.
Thanks but no thanks, I'll pass on your version of "freedom"; mine includes the ability to pursue happiness as I see fit, not as you do.
Yes, unions will fix it! Just like they saved the American car industry. Oh, wait.
You're an idiot. The American car industry's problems aren't with its labor costs, it's with their product -- a product that apparently fewer and fewer customers want. And the products are the result of design, which is dictated by what the marketing types think the customers want. And these marketing type seemed to think that the customers were always going to want huge SUVs, and the top-level executives at these companies couldn't figure out that designs needed to be updated more often as the whims of the consumer changed.
As for the labor and pension and retirement-benefits cost: did you know that after WW2, the UAW wanted to be the organization offering the medical and retirement benefits to the workers? But the employers said no, they wanted to handle those benefits, because if your pension is based on the years you work for a specific employer, the more likely it is that you'll stay with that employer for your whole career.
Now, of course, the auto manufacturers are reaping what they've sown -- rather than let the union deal with a very large retiree population, the manufacturers have to deal with it.
So Steve Jobs does more important work and accomplishes more than commander of ISAF?
Yes.
News flash, ISAF is rebuilding Afghanistan, what's Apple or Microsoft doing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
You haven't explained how an unestablished, no-name company can get work "based on the strength of our presentation and our past work and that was all". There is NO past work to rely on. To call somebody "unprofessional" because they don't have the stature to act like an established company is ridiculous and self-serving.