This certainly fits my experience. I'm "over 39" and have specific tech skills that date back to the early 80s. Those are worthless. I continued doing highly technical work and staying current into the late 90s, when I went back to school to build up some of my non-technical skills. Not such a good idea as it sounded. I emerged from school several years later with just enough still-marketable skills to land a tech job that offered little opportunity to further advance my skills, then got laid off from that, took a retail job as a life raft.... and now my "freshest" marketable tech skills are a dozen years old, and close to worthless. I guess it's time to get out the paintbrushes and see if I can swing a new career as an artist; at least the half-life on those skills isn't as short.
"Disruptive innovation" isn't about disrupting your own business by shooting yourself repeatedly in the face.
Giving him credit for the the "boldness" of the Qwikster plan then the "sense" to kill it is like congratulating someone for being "bold" enough to stick their hand in the blender, then for the "sense" to pull it out.
Netflix needs to lose everybody in senior management. The fact that Reed Hastings has the sense of a radish is obvious enough, but they've been messing up at all sorts of levels, including things that never got to his level. The redesign of their web site which broke all kinds of common sense usability guidelines and was less useful was the first one I noticed, followed immediately by a bungling of the PR response to it, claiming they had done focus group testing (which is either a lie or proof that they don't know how to do testing in addition to not knowing how to do design). Then there was the big price hike following a smaller price hike, which instead of being honest about the reasons they tried to spin as "new lower prices", etc. etc. I predicted way back when the web site blunder went thru that Netflix had been successful purely by luck (not strategic or managerial skill), and was doomed to collapse in a heap of incompetence when things got tough for them. It 800,000 subscribers lost this quarter, they say?
To be fair, I've never seen any signs of this competence-rot at the lower levels of the company. I always got the right DVDs with really fast turn-around. Give those people some good leadership to support and Netflix could go places... other than bankruptcy.
Netflix reminds me of the company I worked for right out of college. The CEO (who'd inherited the job) was clueless about how to run a business, but didn't realize it. He surrounded himself with equally clueless people, who recruited people with the same competence to be their lieutenants. They went from making lots of money and expanding coast-to-coast... to nothing, in a few years.
"Kind of the same reason I still use DVDs instead of Blurays, I guess."
Same here. Sure the newer stuff is technically better, but the old stuff is good enough. I'm primarily a Mac user, but there are things I need Windows for, and for me Windows XP is still the answer that makes the most sense. For example, I have an old TabletPC slate that I use for drawing. Win7 would walk like a crippled dog on it. Besides, I hardly spend any time interacting with the OS; I just load it then run my drawing program. The handful of Windows apps that I use on my iMac once in a while all run on WinXP, so I just load an instance of that OS via VMware and run them on that.
The bottom line is that Windows 7 offers me nothing at all that I need, and precious little that I want, compared to WinXP. Upgrading would be change for the sake of change (which Microsoft excels at, altering things for no apparent reason with every version), and simply isn't worth the hassle. I'll stick with it until that is no longer true (i.e. when developers start dropping support for XP as a platform).
I have to wonder whether this system has lost its effectiveness today. In the 1960s, the combination of radio and television would reach a pretty big percentage of the population; during the day someone in any given house or office was probably watching TV or listening to the radio. But with more people listening to music on iPods and watching video on DVD/DVR - to say nothing of streaming services over IP - that's a lot more gaps in the system.
I saw a video online recently about a upcoming iPad app that uses a voice to interact with the user. Based on the name the user gives during setup, the app responds to female users with a female voice, and responds to male users with the same female voice... flirting like a horny spokesmodel on a late-night-TV phone-sex advert. Like that episode Star Trek where the [i]Enterprise[/i] computer has been overhauled by the women of planet Estrogen-5 (or whatever) and starts flirting with every crewmember who isn't wearing a miniskirt. But without the excuse of it being done in the 1960s. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of juvenile hetero men out there who would love this kind of half-century throwback, but I just found it annoying, to the point that I didn't even finish watching the demo, and I sure as hell won't bother looking at the app when it comes out.
"Y'know what you could do as your 'day job' which you can depend entirely on? Performing your goddamn creation!"
Art != Performance.
Touring can sometimes work for musicians. (At least for a limited number of them; the market for live music isn't all that big.) It doesn't work for... just about any other kind of creator. There is very little money in book signings/readings (for anybody who is not a big name bestseller)? The notion of a moviemaker going on the road and doing live performances doesn't even make sense. Likewise illustrators or software developers or anybody else whose creation is not performable. If we as a society don't figure out some way to make those livable professions (like copyright did for a while there) then I guess we'll have to settle for arena rock as the bulk of the 21st century's cultural legacy.
"I'm not saying your works are garbage, but simply no one wants them."
Where do you get that assumption? There are huge amounts of creative work out there that - judging by the number of people downloading them from torrents - people want; they're just not paying the creators for them.
OK, so if we accept that corporations/publishers are evil and worthless, the MPAA and RIAA are worse than worthless, and they don't deserve the benefits of copyright..... what about individual creators? As someone who has developed software, written stories, and created art, all as an independent creator, why should I be expected to relinquish all my work to the Pirate Domain? Why should I have to depend entirely on a day job to support myself, while everything I manage to create in the rest of my waking hours must be "shared" with everyone with no compensation? Wouldn't it better support the creation of new works if it were possible for someone like me to actually make a living from it?
Where on earth would you get the idea that all Africans have sickle cell anemia?
And again I ask: Who did you think all those reports about the horrible death toll due to malaria in Africa were talking about?
I'm not complaining that the government should do it, just suggesting that looking to soulless corporations (who already have my money) to do it was even stupider.
Where on earth would you get the idea that Africans were immune? Did you think that it was only killing hundreds of thousands of Europeans and Asians per year in Africa?
There's this concept that's been catching on in (most of) the civilized world for the past few millennia called "government". It typically collects money from individuals and pools it to be spent on things that address the greater good of humanity.
This surprises me not at all, especially after coming from msn.com (default IE page on a new Windows installation) where one of the lead stories is an embarrassing video of an elderly entertainer who fell asleep on live TV. Vapidity, voyeurism, and vanity are what sell in our culture.
If you were the President and you knew about this impending doom, would you decide to alert your country?
Yes, I would, so I could go on TV and say "See? I've been telling you we need to spend more money on space science! But no...! Now we're all screwed because you all wanted another tax cut for your bosses!"
I'm showing my partisan bias here, but I think it's telling the Republican gave us the not-quite-calling-it-tubes comment that "they're going to force everybody that uses Amazon to go through their server", and the Democrat gave us the literary word-play of "Big Browser".
Slashdot Mirror
Getting out the C?O wing sounds like a forward move to me.
This certainly fits my experience. I'm "over 39" and have specific tech skills that date back to the early 80s. Those are worthless. I continued doing highly technical work and staying current into the late 90s, when I went back to school to build up some of my non-technical skills. Not such a good idea as it sounded. I emerged from school several years later with just enough still-marketable skills to land a tech job that offered little opportunity to further advance my skills, then got laid off from that, took a retail job as a life raft.... and now my "freshest" marketable tech skills are a dozen years old, and close to worthless. I guess it's time to get out the paintbrushes and see if I can swing a new career as an artist; at least the half-life on those skills isn't as short.
"Disruptive innovation" isn't about disrupting your own business by shooting yourself repeatedly in the face.
Giving him credit for the the "boldness" of the Qwikster plan then the "sense" to kill it is like congratulating someone for being "bold" enough to stick their hand in the blender, then for the "sense" to pull it out.
Netflix needs to lose everybody in senior management. The fact that Reed Hastings has the sense of a radish is obvious enough, but they've been messing up at all sorts of levels, including things that never got to his level. The redesign of their web site which broke all kinds of common sense usability guidelines and was less useful was the first one I noticed, followed immediately by a bungling of the PR response to it, claiming they had done focus group testing (which is either a lie or proof that they don't know how to do testing in addition to not knowing how to do design). Then there was the big price hike following a smaller price hike, which instead of being honest about the reasons they tried to spin as "new lower prices", etc. etc. I predicted way back when the web site blunder went thru that Netflix had been successful purely by luck (not strategic or managerial skill), and was doomed to collapse in a heap of incompetence when things got tough for them. It 800,000 subscribers lost this quarter, they say?
To be fair, I've never seen any signs of this competence-rot at the lower levels of the company. I always got the right DVDs with really fast turn-around. Give those people some good leadership to support and Netflix could go places... other than bankruptcy.
Netflix reminds me of the company I worked for right out of college. The CEO (who'd inherited the job) was clueless about how to run a business, but didn't realize it. He surrounded himself with equally clueless people, who recruited people with the same competence to be their lieutenants. They went from making lots of money and expanding coast-to-coast... to nothing, in a few years.
"Kind of the same reason I still use DVDs instead of Blurays, I guess."
Same here. Sure the newer stuff is technically better, but the old stuff is good enough. I'm primarily a Mac user, but there are things I need Windows for, and for me Windows XP is still the answer that makes the most sense. For example, I have an old TabletPC slate that I use for drawing. Win7 would walk like a crippled dog on it. Besides, I hardly spend any time interacting with the OS; I just load it then run my drawing program. The handful of Windows apps that I use on my iMac once in a while all run on WinXP, so I just load an instance of that OS via VMware and run them on that.
The bottom line is that Windows 7 offers me nothing at all that I need, and precious little that I want, compared to WinXP. Upgrading would be change for the sake of change (which Microsoft excels at, altering things for no apparent reason with every version), and simply isn't worth the hassle. I'll stick with it until that is no longer true (i.e. when developers start dropping support for XP as a platform).
I have to wonder whether this system has lost its effectiveness today. In the 1960s, the combination of radio and television would reach a pretty big percentage of the population; during the day someone in any given house or office was probably watching TV or listening to the radio. But with more people listening to music on iPods and watching video on DVD/DVR - to say nothing of streaming services over IP - that's a lot more gaps in the system.
Did they pick 11/9 for this on purpose?
I saw a video online recently about a upcoming iPad app that uses a voice to interact with the user. Based on the name the user gives during setup, the app responds to female users with a female voice, and responds to male users with the same female voice... flirting like a horny spokesmodel on a late-night-TV phone-sex advert. Like that episode Star Trek where the [i]Enterprise[/i] computer has been overhauled by the women of planet Estrogen-5 (or whatever) and starts flirting with every crewmember who isn't wearing a miniskirt. But without the excuse of it being done in the 1960s. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of juvenile hetero men out there who would love this kind of half-century throwback, but I just found it annoying, to the point that I didn't even finish watching the demo, and I sure as hell won't bother looking at the app when it comes out.
"Y'know what you could do as your 'day job' which you can depend entirely on? Performing your goddamn creation!"
Art != Performance.
Touring can sometimes work for musicians. (At least for a limited number of them; the market for live music isn't all that big.) It doesn't work for... just about any other kind of creator. There is very little money in book signings/readings (for anybody who is not a big name bestseller)? The notion of a moviemaker going on the road and doing live performances doesn't even make sense. Likewise illustrators or software developers or anybody else whose creation is not performable. If we as a society don't figure out some way to make those livable professions (like copyright did for a while there) then I guess we'll have to settle for arena rock as the bulk of the 21st century's cultural legacy.
"I'm not saying your works are garbage, but simply no one wants them."
Where do you get that assumption? There are huge amounts of creative work out there that - judging by the number of people downloading them from torrents - people want; they're just not paying the creators for them.
OK, so if we accept that corporations/publishers are evil and worthless, the MPAA and RIAA are worse than worthless, and they don't deserve the benefits of copyright..... what about individual creators? As someone who has developed software, written stories, and created art, all as an independent creator, why should I be expected to relinquish all my work to the Pirate Domain? Why should I have to depend entirely on a day job to support myself, while everything I manage to create in the rest of my waking hours must be "shared" with everyone with no compensation? Wouldn't it better support the creation of new works if it were possible for someone like me to actually make a living from it?
Where on earth would you get the idea that all Africans have sickle cell anemia? And again I ask: Who did you think all those reports about the horrible death toll due to malaria in Africa were talking about?
I'm not complaining that the government should do it, just suggesting that looking to soulless corporations (who already have my money) to do it was even stupider.
When people that insane are against you, there's a good chance you're doing something right.
Yeah, most people would be ashamed to post something so fucking stupid.
It works by triggering the human immune system. I can't imagine that mosquitoes have anything resembling that to work with.
Where on earth would you get the idea that Africans were immune? Did you think that it was only killing hundreds of thousands of Europeans and Asians per year in Africa?
There's this concept that's been catching on in (most of) the civilized world for the past few millennia called "government". It typically collects money from individuals and pools it to be spent on things that address the greater good of humanity.
This surprises me not at all, especially after coming from msn.com (default IE page on a new Windows installation) where one of the lead stories is an embarrassing video of an elderly entertainer who fell asleep on live TV. Vapidity, voyeurism, and vanity are what sell in our culture.
And this is related to my comment... how?
The only people who are offended by that line are the people it applies to.
Yeah, I set my computer's clock by looking at my watch.
Yes, I would, so I could go on TV and say "See? I've been telling you we need to spend more money on space science! But no...! Now we're all screwed because you all wanted another tax cut for your bosses!"
I'm showing my partisan bias here, but I think it's telling the Republican gave us the not-quite-calling-it-tubes comment that "they're going to force everybody that uses Amazon to go through their server", and the Democrat gave us the literary word-play of "Big Browser".
While I would welcome an iOS version of LibreOffice some day, what I really want in the near future is a viewer for its native file formats.