The films that cost a lot less to make, but eventually paid back their investors on the profits of small screening runs, video cassettes and DVDs are a dying, if not dead breed. The future is barnstorming blockbusters that make their budget back in the first week or so. The "long tail" was just a bullshit hypothesis that didn't pan out.
It's interesting that on Slashdot, when it's anyone else's non-IT job getting outsourced or automated, there is a lot of chortling and discussion of buggy whip manufacturers and how non-IT workers should just suck it up. There was a story about automated truck drivers in the last month that was full of comments denigrating these workers and that it was good for society that their job would soon be done by a robot.
When it's an IT job getting outsourced, "IT'S AN OUTRAGE!!!!!"
Doesn't take much insight to realize why this issue will never get political traction. Who wants to stick up for the IT people when the IT people just offered snark for everyone else that was automated/outsourced before them?
Windows administrators are cheaper because Microsoft pursued a strategy of ensuring that there was a training infrastructure for their products. There is a whole ecosystem of books, online material and courses created by Microsoft to facilitate people learning their product. No such infrastructure exists for open source products. It may not even be possible to create such an infrastructure.
A lot of people commenting on this thread have pointed out that the future of OO.org is looking quite murky and the future is Libre Office.
This may not be a great thing. Organizations like certainty - and if OO.org quickly goes down for the count it doesn't mean that big organizations are likely to adopt the replacement suite.
Think of the following situation. You've recently convinced your organization to switch from MS Office to OO.org. Now you've got to tell them that you actually have to switch to a new product called Libre Office which sorta kinda did and kinda didn't exist a couple of months ago. The question will come up: "What's wrong with that Open Office program you wanted us all to switch to?"
Good luck coming up with an answer that is going to make sense to a suit who is not well versed in the byzantine going ons in the FOSS community.
Stephenson writes the first draft with a fountain pen - he then puts it all into his word processor from there. He doesn't do multiple drafts that way.
Why, so instead of coming up with something original, we are subjected to endless new Star Wars films?
If someone would be creative enough to come up with an awesome retelling of Star Wars, they are creative enough to come up with their own awesome and unique story.
Shorten copyright terms and studios will engage in more "going back to the same well" behavior with popular stuff because, hey, it made money before so lets do it again.
Can anything that someone goes to so much effort to critique truly have failed?
Surely a reasonable standard of failure would be a movie like StarCrash which had David Hasslehoff fighting a stop motion robot with a lightsaber.
Cyber Shield? Is this like SDI for the internets? Zapping the rogue packets in the boost phase before they approach the systems that they target?
How about instead of creating Cyber Shields, people are just reminded to read security bulletins and keep their software up to date?
Your book has likely been pirated. A lot of technical books are and odds on you are answering technical queries from people that hadn't actually bothered to purchase your book.
As long as we can permanently publish your evaluation so all future employers and employees can see it. Cos you'd totally be up for that wouldn't you. Information wants to be free and so on.
@wilw has posted to Slashdot 4 times since late 2007.
http://slashdot.org/~CleverNickName/comments
Didn't post in any of the new Star Trek movie threads.
Probably no longer a regular. Certainly posts more regularly to places like Fark.com than here.
Endlessly extending copyright causes a net decrease in the amount of books/music/etc. available, here's why:
Except that in 2009 there are more new book titles published in a single day than there were in a whole month in 1969. 800 new titles EVERY DAY in the USA (citation: http://amarketingexpert.com/ameblog/publishing-news/800-books-published-each-day-in-the-us/)
There are more new songs released every week in 2009 than there were in six months in 1969.
I dunno how you get your decrease figure when the number of titles published each day is already insanely high. Whatever one wants to say about it, the current copyright rules don't seem to actually stop people creating new works and it could be successfully argued, if you look at the figure, that the current system seems to have provided us with more works of culture on a daily basis than most people could consume in a decade. Even if 99% of it is crap, that's still 8 books published each day that aren't crap. How long does it take you to read 8 books? Longer than a day I suspect.
Go and read Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions". It is 40 years old, but is a good basic introduction to how revolutions in scientific thought occur. Examining real scientific revolutions through historical documents indicate that they don't work according to the simple model that you propose.
Textbooks don't sell anything like what a best selling hard cover book sells like. Most textbooks will be lucky to sell a couple of thousand copies. Few college level textbook authors will see anything beyond a couple of thousand dollars in an advance. That's a couple of thousand dollars for upwards of two years work putting together the textbook. Unlike hardback fiction, textbooks need to be fact checked. Do you really think that the editorial costs of a JK Rowling book are anything approaching the costs for running the appropriate eyes over a college level textbook? Do you think these people work for free?
I was limiting my generalization to Art rather than "information". I think that information, because of its time dependent utility, can be professionalized. Much information is "use it or lose it" - so a provider can extract value from it for a short duration. The longer that information is published, the more likely it is to be replicated in a way that precludes it being monetized.
Dating sites are a bit different from Art. Although free sites exist, the main benefit of the dating sites is that the paywall acts as a bozo filter. Again this sort of information can be professionalized - but I don't think it counts as Art.
Art is a bit different in that a digital copy of it "retains" its "value" for substantially longer. By value I'm talking about something that comes out of the answer to the question "why would you regularly watch movies made 5 years ago or read books written 5 years ago but not read newspapers written 5 years ago" rather than monetary value.
Salon can monetize what it has because by the time people replicate it digitally the content's value has degraded. People have to go to Salon to get the value. Art that can be digitally replicated retains some sort of value, which means you can wait for it to become ripped or whatever and still get something out of it.
I haven't argued that the old business models are dead. They are. The Internet is FANTASTIC at destroying old business models. But that doesn't mean that there is a replacement business model that works to produce anything approximating a similar result.
It just isn't my limited imagination - alternative business models have been hypothesized for years - but the problem is that *none of them work all that well either*. People far smarter than you and I have been trying to nut this out and still haven't got it.
The old business models *don't work*. The hypothesized alternatives *don't work either*.
Nothing can be done about this - that the old models are as dead as communism is not in doubt. The problem is that we keep grasping at straws believing that somehow some new genius model will come along where we still get to watch great new movies, read great books and hear great music for free.
It may come along. It may be out there - but no one has found it yet. Sometimes the solutions to hard mathematical problems are found after a long time looking and sometimes there isn't a solution at all.
In the next 20 years we will see the production of anything that is digitally reproducible and which can't be done on a voluntary basis dry up. Professional art will still exist, but only for those forms of art which are impossible to digitally replicate. That's great for painters and sculptors, not so great for writers, movie/tv creators and music producers.
As for fame and capitalization - I think you should go and meet some real famous people and talk to them. Not about the fame itself, but about what you can do with it. With few exceptions the answer is *not a whole lot* (and again, don't think these people haven't tried).
Live with your head in the sand.
You can't live off public speaking. If you'd ever done it you'd know that even with the big conferences the conference pays your transport, pays for your accommodation and may offer a small per-diem. You can't live off that, unless you are public speaking *every day*. I've been flown to the other side of the world to speak - but other than having my expenses covered, very very few people *make* any money off it. The economics of conferences are such that in general the speakers *do* *not* *get* *paid*. A very few speakers do get paid - but the market for paid speaking gigs is minuscule and already saturated. That's why most of us already do it for free - because at least that way we get a free trip to another city and get to stay in a nice hotel. But you can't work for 10 months so that you can spend two months living in a nice hotel at the expense of a conference.
Free advertising for the artist? Advertising for what? They can't sell their art!!!! Advertising is only good if you've got a product to sell. What product do you have to sell if it can be digitally replicated for free?
Live concerts? You know that concerts are loss leaders to sell albums right? Artists tour when when have a new album to sell - that's why when you go to a concert they play stuff from their new album - because they need to sell that. If concerts were the money spinner, they'd just play the "classics" that "everyone loves". The albums don't sell the concerts - the concerts sell the albums. The concerts still make a loss when you're charged an arm and a leg to attend.
Any art in future will be voluntary. There ISN'T a business model for it. All the stuff you faff on about doesn't feed the kids or pay the rent. People who are currently producing art professionally are already moving towards something where there is a real business model rather than some hypothetical one.
Customers are people that pay for things. People that do not pay for things are not customers. There is no business model for art that can be digitally reproduced. In the future, all art that can be digitally reproduced will be done by volunteers as there is no way to professionalize art that can be digitally reproduced.
In 10 years any art that can be digitally reproduced will be created on a voluntary basis because there is no model to make money off art in a digital economy.
Except that in the book Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes falsifies this myth by showing that Soviet expenditure on arms peaked well before Reagan came to power and was in decline throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan gets credit for bringing down a system during his presidency that had already failed and was in significant decline during his governership of California. The USA wouldn't have had to have spent a cent more on its military during the 80's and it still would have achieved the same result.
Slashdot Mirror
The films that cost a lot less to make, but eventually paid back their investors on the profits of small screening runs, video cassettes and DVDs are a dying, if not dead breed. The future is barnstorming blockbusters that make their budget back in the first week or so. The "long tail" was just a bullshit hypothesis that didn't pan out.
It's interesting that on Slashdot, when it's anyone else's non-IT job getting outsourced or automated, there is a lot of chortling and discussion of buggy whip manufacturers and how non-IT workers should just suck it up. There was a story about automated truck drivers in the last month that was full of comments denigrating these workers and that it was good for society that their job would soon be done by a robot. When it's an IT job getting outsourced, "IT'S AN OUTRAGE!!!!!" Doesn't take much insight to realize why this issue will never get political traction. Who wants to stick up for the IT people when the IT people just offered snark for everyone else that was automated/outsourced before them?
Just lock some smart people up in monasteries that only have their doors open every one year, ten years, hundred years and so on.
Windows administrators are cheaper because Microsoft pursued a strategy of ensuring that there was a training infrastructure for their products. There is a whole ecosystem of books, online material and courses created by Microsoft to facilitate people learning their product. No such infrastructure exists for open source products. It may not even be possible to create such an infrastructure.
A lot of people commenting on this thread have pointed out that the future of OO.org is looking quite murky and the future is Libre Office.
This may not be a great thing. Organizations like certainty - and if OO.org quickly goes down for the count it doesn't mean that big organizations are likely to adopt the replacement suite.
Think of the following situation. You've recently convinced your organization to switch from MS Office to OO.org. Now you've got to tell them that you actually have to switch to a new product called Libre Office which sorta kinda did and kinda didn't exist a couple of months ago. The question will come up: "What's wrong with that Open Office program you wanted us all to switch to?"
Good luck coming up with an answer that is going to make sense to a suit who is not well versed in the byzantine going ons in the FOSS community.
Stephenson writes the first draft with a fountain pen - he then puts it all into his word processor from there. He doesn't do multiple drafts that way.
Yet everyone queries it (or one of the other roots) indirectly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver
Why, so instead of coming up with something original, we are subjected to endless new Star Wars films? If someone would be creative enough to come up with an awesome retelling of Star Wars, they are creative enough to come up with their own awesome and unique story. Shorten copyright terms and studios will engage in more "going back to the same well" behavior with popular stuff because, hey, it made money before so lets do it again.
Can anything that someone goes to so much effort to critique truly have failed? Surely a reasonable standard of failure would be a movie like StarCrash which had David Hasslehoff fighting a stop motion robot with a lightsaber.
Cyber Shield? Is this like SDI for the internets? Zapping the rogue packets in the boost phase before they approach the systems that they target? How about instead of creating Cyber Shields, people are just reminded to read security bulletins and keep their software up to date?
Your book has likely been pirated. A lot of technical books are and odds on you are answering technical queries from people that hadn't actually bothered to purchase your book.
As long as we can permanently publish your evaluation so all future employers and employees can see it. Cos you'd totally be up for that wouldn't you. Information wants to be free and so on.
@wilw has posted to Slashdot 4 times since late 2007. http://slashdot.org/~CleverNickName/comments Didn't post in any of the new Star Trek movie threads. Probably no longer a regular. Certainly posts more regularly to places like Fark.com than here.
Endlessly extending copyright causes a net decrease in the amount of books/music/etc. available, here's why: Except that in 2009 there are more new book titles published in a single day than there were in a whole month in 1969. 800 new titles EVERY DAY in the USA (citation: http://amarketingexpert.com/ameblog/publishing-news/800-books-published-each-day-in-the-us/) There are more new songs released every week in 2009 than there were in six months in 1969. I dunno how you get your decrease figure when the number of titles published each day is already insanely high. Whatever one wants to say about it, the current copyright rules don't seem to actually stop people creating new works and it could be successfully argued, if you look at the figure, that the current system seems to have provided us with more works of culture on a daily basis than most people could consume in a decade. Even if 99% of it is crap, that's still 8 books published each day that aren't crap. How long does it take you to read 8 books? Longer than a day I suspect.
Go and read Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions". It is 40 years old, but is a good basic introduction to how revolutions in scientific thought occur. Examining real scientific revolutions through historical documents indicate that they don't work according to the simple model that you propose.
Neal Stephenson writes with a pen. Why would anyone want to buy his computer? http://www.inkygirl.com/neal-stephenson-writing-and-editing-with-a-fountain-pen/
Textbooks don't sell anything like what a best selling hard cover book sells like. Most textbooks will be lucky to sell a couple of thousand copies. Few college level textbook authors will see anything beyond a couple of thousand dollars in an advance. That's a couple of thousand dollars for upwards of two years work putting together the textbook. Unlike hardback fiction, textbooks need to be fact checked. Do you really think that the editorial costs of a JK Rowling book are anything approaching the costs for running the appropriate eyes over a college level textbook? Do you think these people work for free?
I was limiting my generalization to Art rather than "information". I think that information, because of its time dependent utility, can be professionalized. Much information is "use it or lose it" - so a provider can extract value from it for a short duration. The longer that information is published, the more likely it is to be replicated in a way that precludes it being monetized. Dating sites are a bit different from Art. Although free sites exist, the main benefit of the dating sites is that the paywall acts as a bozo filter. Again this sort of information can be professionalized - but I don't think it counts as Art. Art is a bit different in that a digital copy of it "retains" its "value" for substantially longer. By value I'm talking about something that comes out of the answer to the question "why would you regularly watch movies made 5 years ago or read books written 5 years ago but not read newspapers written 5 years ago" rather than monetary value. Salon can monetize what it has because by the time people replicate it digitally the content's value has degraded. People have to go to Salon to get the value. Art that can be digitally replicated retains some sort of value, which means you can wait for it to become ripped or whatever and still get something out of it.
I haven't argued that the old business models are dead. They are. The Internet is FANTASTIC at destroying old business models. But that doesn't mean that there is a replacement business model that works to produce anything approximating a similar result. It just isn't my limited imagination - alternative business models have been hypothesized for years - but the problem is that *none of them work all that well either*. People far smarter than you and I have been trying to nut this out and still haven't got it. The old business models *don't work*. The hypothesized alternatives *don't work either*. Nothing can be done about this - that the old models are as dead as communism is not in doubt. The problem is that we keep grasping at straws believing that somehow some new genius model will come along where we still get to watch great new movies, read great books and hear great music for free. It may come along. It may be out there - but no one has found it yet. Sometimes the solutions to hard mathematical problems are found after a long time looking and sometimes there isn't a solution at all. In the next 20 years we will see the production of anything that is digitally reproducible and which can't be done on a voluntary basis dry up. Professional art will still exist, but only for those forms of art which are impossible to digitally replicate. That's great for painters and sculptors, not so great for writers, movie/tv creators and music producers. As for fame and capitalization - I think you should go and meet some real famous people and talk to them. Not about the fame itself, but about what you can do with it. With few exceptions the answer is *not a whole lot* (and again, don't think these people haven't tried).
Live with your head in the sand. You can't live off public speaking. If you'd ever done it you'd know that even with the big conferences the conference pays your transport, pays for your accommodation and may offer a small per-diem. You can't live off that, unless you are public speaking *every day*. I've been flown to the other side of the world to speak - but other than having my expenses covered, very very few people *make* any money off it. The economics of conferences are such that in general the speakers *do* *not* *get* *paid*. A very few speakers do get paid - but the market for paid speaking gigs is minuscule and already saturated. That's why most of us already do it for free - because at least that way we get a free trip to another city and get to stay in a nice hotel. But you can't work for 10 months so that you can spend two months living in a nice hotel at the expense of a conference. Free advertising for the artist? Advertising for what? They can't sell their art!!!! Advertising is only good if you've got a product to sell. What product do you have to sell if it can be digitally replicated for free? Live concerts? You know that concerts are loss leaders to sell albums right? Artists tour when when have a new album to sell - that's why when you go to a concert they play stuff from their new album - because they need to sell that. If concerts were the money spinner, they'd just play the "classics" that "everyone loves". The albums don't sell the concerts - the concerts sell the albums. The concerts still make a loss when you're charged an arm and a leg to attend. Any art in future will be voluntary. There ISN'T a business model for it. All the stuff you faff on about doesn't feed the kids or pay the rent. People who are currently producing art professionally are already moving towards something where there is a real business model rather than some hypothetical one.
Customers are people that pay for things. People that do not pay for things are not customers. There is no business model for art that can be digitally reproduced. In the future, all art that can be digitally reproduced will be done by volunteers as there is no way to professionalize art that can be digitally reproduced.
In 10 years any art that can be digitally reproduced will be created on a voluntary basis because there is no model to make money off art in a digital economy.
How about this for a fundamental law: If you aren't paying for the product you are not a customer.
Except that in the book Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes falsifies this myth by showing that Soviet expenditure on arms peaked well before Reagan came to power and was in decline throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan gets credit for bringing down a system during his presidency that had already failed and was in significant decline during his governership of California. The USA wouldn't have had to have spent a cent more on its military during the 80's and it still would have achieved the same result.
As long as Starbuck isn't suddenly invisible, it could work.