There's a legitimate function that record companies can play in the more level playing field that the Internet offers. Bands need production help, distribution help, and promotion help in a lot of ways and it is not unreasonable that the folks who provide that help be paid for their efforts. Consumers need help filtering the wheat from the chaff, and they need convenient places to shop, and it makes sense that the folks who do that work get paid for that too.
The current problem (actually, it has been a problem for a long time) is that the big five record companies have been surviving for a long time by legally locking up all of the major distribution channels and then screwing the artists and consumers six ways till Sunday. When they face the end of that monopoly situation they know their days are numbered (which explains the apoplexy over Internet music, and the antics of the RIAA). It's not that record companies are inherently evil, it's that for a long time they didn't have to compete on the basis of adding maximum value to their bands and consumers. They are used to eating all of the profits from the production and distribution of music, and that's going to change.
The future will belong to record companies that add maximum value to bands and add maximum calue to customers. The ones who screw musicians and screw consumers will experience a long overdue death.
I have been doing business with the folks at CDBaby.com (www.cdbaby.com) for a long time and they seem to be doing a fair bit of good work along these lines. (I am not affiliated with them in any way other than being an occasional customer.)
I didn't say that what we have today is great (I think it sucks) but letting the politicians pay themselves out of the treasury is CERTAIN to screw things up far worse than they are today. The fact that it is possible to buy legislation is a big problem (best solved as I see it by taking the power to pass such legislation in the first place as the US Constitution does), but it's a lot better than putting the politicians in charge of their own financing and having them just take the money by force. At least now they have to ask nicely.
This has nothing to do with Libertarian ideology (and I'm not a big L libertarian anyway). It is obvious what letting the politicians pay themselves out of the treasure will accomplish and anyone left, right, center, communist, or Nazi should be able to see it just as clearly.
Regarding public financing elsewhere in the world, I know that is how things are done in all dictatorships and they aren't too cool. I also know that in Europe they have people in parliament from communist and fascist parties which we don't have here in the US. Lots of countries have all kinds of stupid policies and practices going on. They have socialism for their companies, their poor, their politicians, and their artists. They are all bad ideas in their own ways. Collectively all of the little things we do better than they do explain why we are a superpower and they aren't. If you want to live in those kinds of countries when why not move to them instead of importing their unwise policies to the US?
A better approach than complaining that "other countries do it" and "you are a cultist" would be to explain why it is that what I predicted isn't the obvious result of welfare for politicians. From a legal point of view you also need to explain how it is that such a system of Congress being its own exclusive special interest group doesn't violate the Constitution both in spirit and the letter of the law.
This whole mess got started when FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court in order to get the power to do whatever he pleased even if it was unconstitutional. Instead of creating an even bigger problem let's undo the change and start abiding by the Constitution again like we did before WWII. That solution would at least have the virtue of making things better and not worse.
My impression is Leahy is occasionally good and occasionally terrible. I don't know Boucher as well, but my impression of him is about the same. Didn't he sponsor some Internet taxation law a while back? Tell me again why I should spend my hard earned after tax income trying to do nice things for such icons of excellence?
As for the idea of public campaign financing, I think that's the worst thing you could EVER do to the political process short of installing a dictator. "Public financing" sound far too benign. Let's call this what it is: welfare for politicians. Giving them the money and hte ability to vote themselves more of it is terribly dangerous. Worse, it removes the only reason they currently bother paying attention to what we say. If they didn't need to pay attention to the world outside of Washington in order to raise money they would lose all interest in what anyone has to say. Their sole interest would be in communicating the other way...telling us what we should think, and doing it with out own money against our will.
Consider too, the fate of people whose views are so unpopular today that they have no political power. The neo-Nazis, the new age cult freaks, and NAMBLA folks would LOVE to get their hands on vast sums of "free" money to promote their views wouldn't they? Or woul the entrenched politicians erect barriers that would keep less powerful political opponents out of the system even more than they do today? Of course they would.
Public campaign financing is more than just unconstitutional (which it is), it's also bound to produce effects contrary to the reasons it is advocated.
OK, if the CEOs were eagerly willing to turn on the money spigot to the politicians who exactly are you saying they should be giving money to? Are any of them even close to having a clue?
Or should we just start paying the most money-grubbing corrupt politicos whose votes are for sale to the highest bidder? Breeding more and more of them and getting them elected? Where do you think that will lead in the long run?
One thing that's often overlooked here is the time horizon in politics versus technology. A tech company will live or die based on how its next product/IPO/bug fix/whatever does in the next 6-12 months. Politics moves FAR slower. Getting a politician elected takes YEARS. Getting a bill proposed, debated, and voted on takes YEARS. And rather than offering an opportunity to pass laws doesn't really matter in terms of tech companies and their activities. By the time Congress even discovers a new product area it's probably dead or dying already anyway, so as a CEO how could you justify throwing away money on lobbying when you could spend it on something productive?
Besides, it's hard to show a return from giving money to one of them in order to get them to "leave us alone" than it is when the steel industry buys a tarrif increase or the coal miners buy access to new coal fields with their "contributions".
But software is different. If the usual nonsense the government forces on cement companies were heaped on the software world (as it is starting to be) it would be dead. It's possible to know that a simple device with a hundred parts that does one thing "works". What about devices with many billions of highly complex interacting parts which is used for an "open-ended" purpose in conjunction with who knows what other such things? And when it doesn't work "right" (whatever that means) what judge or lawyer would have the foggiest idea of why or who was to blame if anyone? In what sense would having armies of lawyers and congressmen "helping" us make anything any better than it is now?
There's nothing "helpful" they can offer except perhaps to send men with guns to the homes of all spammers, kiddie porn sites, and the RIAA?;-)
1000 of which would be geeks anyway. In my many years of discussing things on the Net I have never once seen a politician trouble himself to participate. Think that might be
A. Because they don't care what we think?
B. Because they are put off by the fact that we think they are self-important morons?
C. Because they can't make an honest coherent argument?
I guess that the "centers of power" are important, but where are they? We can get along just fine without them and their nosey and ignorant ways. they on the other hand NEED our attention, money, and votes so they can continue to pretend they are in charge of what we are doing.
Just waht would you propose that we do in the area of "paying attention" to them? We pay a lot more attention to them than they pay to us. I can name a hundred politicians, can then name ten engineers? What good would it do to have them understand a little bit anyway? When we tell them that we don't need them to tell us what to do or "help" us, they will never believe it anyway. The one thing a politician will never believe is that you don't seen him as the center of your social universe and that you don't want him to be.
You can tell if someone is interested in golf because he learns to play the game and buys himself some clubs. You can tell if someone is interested in dogs because he will buy a puppy to live with him, or at least hang out with people who do.
If Mr. Gore were really interested in the Internet he would have bothered to learn to program or sling cable, and maybe even do something hard like get an engineering degree.
If Mr. Gore really was so creative he might have invented TCP/IP, or HTTP, Java, or C++.
If Mr. Gore really wanted to contribute something useful he might have donated some of his own money (or his daddy's money) to promote open source projects to build the Net faster and better.
But he never did any of those things. He voted to spend other people's money on some research projects (which given his lack of comprehension of technological matters, he had no rational reason to think was anything more than a boondoggle). Whoopty fuckin' doo. Voting to spend other people's money on research you don't understand isn't a demonstration of insight or sincere interest, it's a demonstration of his willingness to buy power with taxpayer money.
Gore is a power-hungry politician. He is like most politicians in that he cares about only one thing, and it's not the Internet. He'd make the Internet illegal in a second if he thought it would get him a lot of votes, campaign contributions, or political pull. You can tell that because seeking political power is all he has ever done in his life. I'll reconsider my opinion if he troubles himself to write HelloWorld() to demonstrate a passing interest and understanding of what we do.
If I were interested in being a power monger I would be out there trying to take credit for other people's accomplishments too. I'd be buying influence with taxpayer money, and be trying like mad to get elected to the highest office I could, but I'm not. Gore had as much to do with the creation of the Internet as I had to do with the outcome of the presidential election. After all, I took my own time to read a bit, watched some TV, and voted and that's more than Gore did regarding the Net.
If you read Gore's book "Earth In The Balance", he also claims to know a lot about computer architecture and claims that we need to put loads of PCs into elementary schools so that they can work in parallel to solve very hand problems. I don't doubt that there was some seed of truth in Gore's famous gaff, but it is also the case that Gore thinks he's a genius who ought to be calling the shots in all areas of technology and economics, and that is transparently false (not to mention unconstitutional).
What you learn at MBA school is to SAY all kinds of things about respecting employees and taking good care of them and listening. In fact they say such things all the time. I have generally found that MBAs do a lot less of all of this than just about any other group. Seriously, is there any other professional category you can think of which is less correlated with these kinds of policies? Lawyers? Salesmen? Anyone?
In other words, financial analysts can only measure linear growth as measured by financial results in order to predict future prospects for profits. That's a key problem I think. Sure, money is easy to measure, especially if you don't understand people, technology, and organizations. I think two questions make the reality of the situation clear:
1. What kind of idiot thinks that profits and company growth follows straight lines from the past into the future?
2. What kind of moron thinks that predictions based on last quarter's balance sheet are more accurate than one based on whether the company is full of creative geniuses working to their best potential with lots of cool stuff in the pipeline or whether it's packed with shortsighted PHBs and petty political squabbles?
The fact that accountants aren't very good at counting PHBs doesn't mean that counting them isn't a better way of guessing about what the company will be doing a few years down the road.
We have all heard complaints about the narrow-mindedness of engineers who "fall in love with their tools" and end up ignoring the needs of the business and the customers as they explore the glories of technology. I have met a lot of people (misguided ones I would say) who think that's the defining characteristic of engineers. While not all engineers suffer from this kind of narrow vision, it is a very common problem among managers, marketeers, salesmen, and money people too.
Managers fall in love with their tools. What are their tools? Meetings, memos, policies, org charts, chains of command, manuals, task forces, consultants, management gurus, and paper forms are the favorite tools of managers, and managers fall in love with them. They generate vast empires of paperwork, rules, meetings, councils, and reviews and they forget that there's actually work to be done and organization tools are supposed to support the business, not substitute for it.
Money people fall in love with their tools too. Their tools are spreadsheets, projections, 10Qs, conference calls, analysis reports, and balance sheets. They convince themselves that if only they can get all the paperwork right the company will be a success and so they sacrifice everything including key employees with special skills and knowledge, long term growth, product quality, and every kind of good sense if it gets in the way of what they think is important. They forget that capital and record keeping are a means to the end of production, not a substitute for it.
Marketing people fall in love with their tools too. Their tools are slogans, ads, glossy packaging, press tours, focus groups, channel strategies, and (often less than honest) spinfests about what the product is and does. They convince themselves that actual product quality, production costs, operations, and development don't really matter. They forget that packaging and promotion exist in order to help move the product, they aren't a substitute for it.
It's worth considering what happens in governments where this syndrome is even more dangerous. Bureaucrats have tools they fall in love with too. They can take people's property, make grand plans, bring immortal bureaucratic agencies into being, give money to their friends, send police, and military forces around and force people to comply with their demands. They forget that people have all kinds of goals, products, and activities that are what's important in life. They forget that laws, police, and armies are a way of dealing with criminals and foreign armies, not a substitute for living and thinking for ourselves.
It is natural to think that your own work is more important, more complex, and more interesting than what everyone else is doing. That's why we see tunnel vision out there so frequently. Seeing the scope of damage that this problem causes in business and elsewhere should give us all reason to think twice before considering the value of what people with very different jobs to be so low or their requirements to simple. That goes in spades for technical companies where nothing is simple and where we don't have good historical guides for how things ought to be organized. We would all do better to stop falling love with our own tools. A cool and fun as they are to use, we need to remember that they are tools for accomplishing things, not ends in themselves.
That's funny. I have heard exactly the same "Work smarter not harder." advice from every single utterly clueless manager I have worked for. None of them has had even the slightest inkling of what was going on but they were required to "mentor" us and give advice, and since they had none to give, they offered up that little gem. It's pretty insulting coming from people who couldn't "work smarter" if their lives depended on it.
I have no doubt that there are good smart managers out there with MBAs and if you are working with some of them then good for you! You are a lucky guy. My personal experience is that MBAs are a mixed bag, but all other things being equal, if some guy who wants to work for me has an MBA that's a black mark on his record. It doesn't mean I'd dismiss his value out of hand, but it would make me more nervous about him than I would be otherwise. I'd rather work with someone who knows a lot about the company's business than someone who knows a lot about writing memos, calling meetings, and strategizing, but who has no idea how the actual work gets done.
This goes in spades for technical companies. It might be (relatively) easy to understand what a shoe company does or what a corn farm does, but understanding the ins and outs of software, IC development, and so on is HARD, and it takes years of intense study to even become stupid about such things. John Scully was a perfect poster boy for the inability to make that leap.
You are probably right that techies tend to not know much about pricing strategies. That's probably good since they rarely have any say in such things. What always amazes me (as someone who was originally a pure techie and now someone who lives in both worlds)is how many times as a techie I had to explain the basics of market segmentation, price elasticity, channel conflict, and so on to people whose JOB it was to do marketing for my products. None of this stuff is rocket science, but lots of people with fancy titles and education don't seem to know anything about their supposed areas of expertise. I have never met a C++ programmer who didn't know what a void pointer was, but I have met TONS of marketdroids who didn't know what a SKU was or what the difference between sales and marketing is. Why do you think that is?
No doubt they are acting contrary to the interests of the company and many know this too (how they can sleep at night still amazes me...I guess that's what amazes me about defense attorneys too). I think there's a category who are so clueless that they have no idea what they are doing and how bad it is. They just learned that you are supposed to act this way and so they do.
Alas, reading lots of Dilbert strips won't help those who have no brain any better than those who have no shame.
Ahh, but that's really an example of the principle I'm talking about here. I'm not saying that no project that is entirely outsourced makes any sense, sometimes they do, but one reason there has been such a surge in these kinds of business structures is that so many management "teams" are so dysfunctional and so unhelpful to the guys doing the frontline work that segregating the "management" into a separate company from the guys doing the work makes the resulting structure stronger than one where the managers are involved with the work itself. If pure managers were helping so much it would be better to have them actually getting involved in the work rather than sitting around in a far away company counting their bonuses and writing memos to one another.
This isn't a matter of too much management versus not enough, but rather one having to do with the issue of what management's proper purpose in a company is. There's no question that there's a need for decision making, leadership, and coordination whenever lots of people are trying to work together on a project. Above a certain size, it even becomes necessary for people to specialize in such areas rather than primarily doing something else more directly useful. The problem is that many managers seem to think that management is a skill for gaining power, and that this is the reason they are employed. The tasks of organizing, controlling, documenting, discussing, and so on are thought by such people not to be the means to the end of producing and selling things, but ends in themselves. Once a company's management stops paying attention to actually doing things and facilitating the goals of the company and places a higher priority on political games, official procedures, power-grabbing, empire building, and so on it is doomed. Once management stops organizing teams to accomplish goals, and valuing the skills and knowledge it takes to understand and deal with issues, it is doomed. When knowledge of the company's business becomes a disqualifying charisteristic when it comes to making decisions it is doomed. When having an MBA means that your opinion matters and that not having one means that it doesn't, the company is doomed.
Management folks can readily see the problems that arise when techies fall so in love with their technologies that they stop thinking about what the customers want, or whether their latest interests advance the needs of the company. In fact, many consider such narrow-mindedness to be a feature of all engineers. Alas, I rarely encounter managers who see as clearly what happens when managers fall in love with their own special areas of interest and ignore everything else necessary to make the company succeed. It's really no different in principle from the other kind of short-sightedness except that it's usually tied up with a lot more ego, more VAST heaps of useless activity, and more blatant mind-numbing stupidity than just about any other idea in the world (except perhaps the "We are from the government and we are here to help you." thing). Since managers generally hire and fire, they are usually better at getting power and wiping out anyone who doesn't share their narrow-minded views. That makes this syndrome the single biggest company killer I have ever seen, yet it seems that the schools that hand out MBAs don't bother to make it the number one lesson for up and coming manager types.
Perhaps they should have to read every Dilbert cartoon ever penned before they are allowed to get their precious MBAs. The problem in companies being killed by this syndrome is not that there's "too much management". It's that the managers are committed to a horribly distorted view of what they are supposed to be doing.
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The current problem (actually, it has been a problem for a long time) is that the big five record companies have been surviving for a long time by legally locking up all of the major distribution channels and then screwing the artists and consumers six ways till Sunday. When they face the end of that monopoly situation they know their days are numbered (which explains the apoplexy over Internet music, and the antics of the RIAA). It's not that record companies are inherently evil, it's that for a long time they didn't have to compete on the basis of adding maximum value to their bands and consumers. They are used to eating all of the profits from the production and distribution of music, and that's going to change.
The future will belong to record companies that add maximum value to bands and add maximum calue to customers. The ones who screw musicians and screw consumers will experience a long overdue death.
I have been doing business with the folks at CDBaby.com (www.cdbaby.com) for a long time and they seem to be doing a fair bit of good work along these lines. (I am not affiliated with them in any way other than being an occasional customer.)
This has nothing to do with Libertarian ideology (and I'm not a big L libertarian anyway). It is obvious what letting the politicians pay themselves out of the treasure will accomplish and anyone left, right, center, communist, or Nazi should be able to see it just as clearly.
Regarding public financing elsewhere in the world, I know that is how things are done in all dictatorships and they aren't too cool. I also know that in Europe they have people in parliament from communist and fascist parties which we don't have here in the US. Lots of countries have all kinds of stupid policies and practices going on. They have socialism for their companies, their poor, their politicians, and their artists. They are all bad ideas in their own ways. Collectively all of the little things we do better than they do explain why we are a superpower and they aren't. If you want to live in those kinds of countries when why not move to them instead of importing their unwise policies to the US?
A better approach than complaining that "other countries do it" and "you are a cultist" would be to explain why it is that what I predicted isn't the obvious result of welfare for politicians. From a legal point of view you also need to explain how it is that such a system of Congress being its own exclusive special interest group doesn't violate the Constitution both in spirit and the letter of the law.
This whole mess got started when FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court in order to get the power to do whatever he pleased even if it was unconstitutional. Instead of creating an even bigger problem let's undo the change and start abiding by the Constitution again like we did before WWII. That solution would at least have the virtue of making things better and not worse.
As for the idea of public campaign financing, I think that's the worst thing you could EVER do to the political process short of installing a dictator. "Public financing" sound far too benign. Let's call this what it is: welfare for politicians. Giving them the money and hte ability to vote themselves more of it is terribly dangerous. Worse, it removes the only reason they currently bother paying attention to what we say. If they didn't need to pay attention to the world outside of Washington in order to raise money they would lose all interest in what anyone has to say. Their sole interest would be in communicating the other way...telling us what we should think, and doing it with out own money against our will.
Consider too, the fate of people whose views are so unpopular today that they have no political power. The neo-Nazis, the new age cult freaks, and NAMBLA folks would LOVE to get their hands on vast sums of "free" money to promote their views wouldn't they? Or woul the entrenched politicians erect barriers that would keep less powerful political opponents out of the system even more than they do today? Of course they would.
Public campaign financing is more than just unconstitutional (which it is), it's also bound to produce effects contrary to the reasons it is advocated.
Or should we just start paying the most money-grubbing corrupt politicos whose votes are for sale to the highest bidder? Breeding more and more of them and getting them elected? Where do you think that will lead in the long run?
Besides, it's hard to show a return from giving money to one of them in order to get them to "leave us alone" than it is when the steel industry buys a tarrif increase or the coal miners buy access to new coal fields with their "contributions".
There's nothing "helpful" they can offer except perhaps to send men with guns to the homes of all spammers, kiddie porn sites, and the RIAA? ;-)
A. Because they don't care what we think?
B. Because they are put off by the fact that we think they are self-important morons?
C. Because they can't make an honest coherent argument?
D. Because they can't type?
E. All of the above?
Just waht would you propose that we do in the area of "paying attention" to them? We pay a lot more attention to them than they pay to us. I can name a hundred politicians, can then name ten engineers? What good would it do to have them understand a little bit anyway? When we tell them that we don't need them to tell us what to do or "help" us, they will never believe it anyway. The one thing a politician will never believe is that you don't seen him as the center of your social universe and that you don't want him to be.
You can tell if someone is interested in golf because he learns to play the game and buys himself some clubs. You can tell if someone is interested in dogs because he will buy a puppy to live with him, or at least hang out with people who do. If Mr. Gore were really interested in the Internet he would have bothered to learn to program or sling cable, and maybe even do something hard like get an engineering degree. If Mr. Gore really was so creative he might have invented TCP/IP, or HTTP, Java, or C++. If Mr. Gore really wanted to contribute something useful he might have donated some of his own money (or his daddy's money) to promote open source projects to build the Net faster and better. But he never did any of those things. He voted to spend other people's money on some research projects (which given his lack of comprehension of technological matters, he had no rational reason to think was anything more than a boondoggle). Whoopty fuckin' doo. Voting to spend other people's money on research you don't understand isn't a demonstration of insight or sincere interest, it's a demonstration of his willingness to buy power with taxpayer money. Gore is a power-hungry politician. He is like most politicians in that he cares about only one thing, and it's not the Internet. He'd make the Internet illegal in a second if he thought it would get him a lot of votes, campaign contributions, or political pull. You can tell that because seeking political power is all he has ever done in his life. I'll reconsider my opinion if he troubles himself to write HelloWorld() to demonstrate a passing interest and understanding of what we do. If I were interested in being a power monger I would be out there trying to take credit for other people's accomplishments too. I'd be buying influence with taxpayer money, and be trying like mad to get elected to the highest office I could, but I'm not. Gore had as much to do with the creation of the Internet as I had to do with the outcome of the presidential election. After all, I took my own time to read a bit, watched some TV, and voted and that's more than Gore did regarding the Net.
If you read Gore's book "Earth In The Balance", he also claims to know a lot about computer architecture and claims that we need to put loads of PCs into elementary schools so that they can work in parallel to solve very hand problems. I don't doubt that there was some seed of truth in Gore's famous gaff, but it is also the case that Gore thinks he's a genius who ought to be calling the shots in all areas of technology and economics, and that is transparently false (not to mention unconstitutional).
What you learn at MBA school is to SAY all kinds of things about respecting employees and taking good care of them and listening. In fact they say such things all the time. I have generally found that MBAs do a lot less of all of this than just about any other group. Seriously, is there any other professional category you can think of which is less correlated with these kinds of policies? Lawyers? Salesmen? Anyone?
1. What kind of idiot thinks that profits and company growth follows straight lines from the past into the future?
2. What kind of moron thinks that predictions based on last quarter's balance sheet are more accurate than one based on whether the company is full of creative geniuses working to their best potential with lots of cool stuff in the pipeline or whether it's packed with shortsighted PHBs and petty political squabbles?
The fact that accountants aren't very good at counting PHBs doesn't mean that counting them isn't a better way of guessing about what the company will be doing a few years down the road.
Managers fall in love with their tools. What are their tools? Meetings, memos, policies, org charts, chains of command, manuals, task forces, consultants, management gurus, and paper forms are the favorite tools of managers, and managers fall in love with them. They generate vast empires of paperwork, rules, meetings, councils, and reviews and they forget that there's actually work to be done and organization tools are supposed to support the business, not substitute for it.
Money people fall in love with their tools too. Their tools are spreadsheets, projections, 10Qs, conference calls, analysis reports, and balance sheets. They convince themselves that if only they can get all the paperwork right the company will be a success and so they sacrifice everything including key employees with special skills and knowledge, long term growth, product quality, and every kind of good sense if it gets in the way of what they think is important. They forget that capital and record keeping are a means to the end of production, not a substitute for it.
Marketing people fall in love with their tools too. Their tools are slogans, ads, glossy packaging, press tours, focus groups, channel strategies, and (often less than honest) spinfests about what the product is and does. They convince themselves that actual product quality, production costs, operations, and development don't really matter. They forget that packaging and promotion exist in order to help move the product, they aren't a substitute for it.
It's worth considering what happens in governments where this syndrome is even more dangerous. Bureaucrats have tools they fall in love with too. They can take people's property, make grand plans, bring immortal bureaucratic agencies into being, give money to their friends, send police, and military forces around and force people to comply with their demands. They forget that people have all kinds of goals, products, and activities that are what's important in life. They forget that laws, police, and armies are a way of dealing with criminals and foreign armies, not a substitute for living and thinking for ourselves.
It is natural to think that your own work is more important, more complex, and more interesting than what everyone else is doing. That's why we see tunnel vision out there so frequently. Seeing the scope of damage that this problem causes in business and elsewhere should give us all reason to think twice before considering the value of what people with very different jobs to be so low or their requirements to simple. That goes in spades for technical companies where nothing is simple and where we don't have good historical guides for how things ought to be organized. We would all do better to stop falling love with our own tools. A cool and fun as they are to use, we need to remember that they are tools for accomplishing things, not ends in themselves.
That's funny. I have heard exactly the same "Work smarter not harder." advice from every single utterly clueless manager I have worked for. None of them has had even the slightest inkling of what was going on but they were required to "mentor" us and give advice, and since they had none to give, they offered up that little gem. It's pretty insulting coming from people who couldn't "work smarter" if their lives depended on it.
I have no doubt that there are good smart managers out there with MBAs and if you are working with some of them then good for you! You are a lucky guy. My personal experience is that MBAs are a mixed bag, but all other things being equal, if some guy who wants to work for me has an MBA that's a black mark on his record. It doesn't mean I'd dismiss his value out of hand, but it would make me more nervous about him than I would be otherwise. I'd rather work with someone who knows a lot about the company's business than someone who knows a lot about writing memos, calling meetings, and strategizing, but who has no idea how the actual work gets done. This goes in spades for technical companies. It might be (relatively) easy to understand what a shoe company does or what a corn farm does, but understanding the ins and outs of software, IC development, and so on is HARD, and it takes years of intense study to even become stupid about such things. John Scully was a perfect poster boy for the inability to make that leap.
You are probably right that techies tend to not know much about pricing strategies. That's probably good since they rarely have any say in such things. What always amazes me (as someone who was originally a pure techie and now someone who lives in both worlds)is how many times as a techie I had to explain the basics of market segmentation, price elasticity, channel conflict, and so on to people whose JOB it was to do marketing for my products. None of this stuff is rocket science, but lots of people with fancy titles and education don't seem to know anything about their supposed areas of expertise. I have never met a C++ programmer who didn't know what a void pointer was, but I have met TONS of marketdroids who didn't know what a SKU was or what the difference between sales and marketing is. Why do you think that is?
No doubt they are acting contrary to the interests of the company and many know this too (how they can sleep at night still amazes me...I guess that's what amazes me about defense attorneys too). I think there's a category who are so clueless that they have no idea what they are doing and how bad it is. They just learned that you are supposed to act this way and so they do. Alas, reading lots of Dilbert strips won't help those who have no brain any better than those who have no shame.
Ahh, but that's really an example of the principle I'm talking about here. I'm not saying that no project that is entirely outsourced makes any sense, sometimes they do, but one reason there has been such a surge in these kinds of business structures is that so many management "teams" are so dysfunctional and so unhelpful to the guys doing the frontline work that segregating the "management" into a separate company from the guys doing the work makes the resulting structure stronger than one where the managers are involved with the work itself. If pure managers were helping so much it would be better to have them actually getting involved in the work rather than sitting around in a far away company counting their bonuses and writing memos to one another.
Management folks can readily see the problems that arise when techies fall so in love with their technologies that they stop thinking about what the customers want, or whether their latest interests advance the needs of the company. In fact, many consider such narrow-mindedness to be a feature of all engineers. Alas, I rarely encounter managers who see as clearly what happens when managers fall in love with their own special areas of interest and ignore everything else necessary to make the company succeed. It's really no different in principle from the other kind of short-sightedness except that it's usually tied up with a lot more ego, more VAST heaps of useless activity, and more blatant mind-numbing stupidity than just about any other idea in the world (except perhaps the "We are from the government and we are here to help you." thing). Since managers generally hire and fire, they are usually better at getting power and wiping out anyone who doesn't share their narrow-minded views. That makes this syndrome the single biggest company killer I have ever seen, yet it seems that the schools that hand out MBAs don't bother to make it the number one lesson for up and coming manager types.
Perhaps they should have to read every Dilbert cartoon ever penned before they are allowed to get their precious MBAs. The problem in companies being killed by this syndrome is not that there's "too much management". It's that the managers are committed to a horribly distorted view of what they are supposed to be doing.