SloppyThoughts

CommercialTube

Much has been made, recently, about Comedy Central's decision to require YouTube to pull copies of the Daily Show, Cobert Report, and South Park. The move has been almost uniformly condemned as being foolish, and a good way for Comedy Central to alienate its fans, resulting in fewer live viewers.

But in a simplistic sense, it's the right move. Any service that uses ad impressions as their primary source of revenue must attempt to curtail any situation that reduces the number of eyes seeing those ads.

Or replace it.

Comedy Central and other services need to make YouTube part of their revenue stream ... either with the same business model or a new one. Not just as hooks to get live viewers, or free research with which to determine which episodes should be in "best of" DVD releases (the only kind of DVD release likely to be viable with a current events show), but as ad impression-generators as well. To make this desirable and successful, YouTube will need to facilitate the process ... soliciting contributions from companies like Comedy Central that have advertising incorporated in the video, preventing unapproved copies of the video, and providing verifiable metrics on viewers.

Unfortunately, it may be too late now. If this had been done instead of pulling all the Comedy Central content, fans might have embraced the convenience, even if they had to suffer through the same ads (although I'd hope Comedy Central would recognize the need for shorter ads in that context) ... but now the same act would be seen less as an attempt on Comedy Central's part to provide value to viewers and customers, and more a blatantly mercenary act done with total disregard for the viewers. Comedy Central, without extreme creativity, can only be the villain, now. YouTube can be the hero.

Today's Blinders

Tom Smith has decided to trot out both Socialist fallacies and an ignorance of the lifecycle of technological innovation, and since people are actually paying attention thanks to an Instapundit link, I felt I must respond.

There's rarely much hope in talking about creating the value in money, or the imaginary zero-sum game, or the fact that huge dreams provide huge motivation to those who can accomplish great things and provide so much value to the world (which then *gasp* pays for it), or any of the usual tripe-prevention, and I won't comment at length on the contemptible act of suggesting that Charles Simonyi and his like-minded dreamers fantasize about sexual promiscuity to rival some of Heinlein's characters. Those aren't within the scope of this blog anyway.

But I will comment on Smith's apparent ignorance of the life-cycle of technological innovation.

Most revolutionary innovation goes through a very predictable sequence. First is the basic research and commercial idea ... proof of feasability. Many people think it is appropriate for the government to finance this effort, although I do not. The first commercial idea is almost always bare-boned and ridiculously expensive. Its commercial success relies on rich people or corporations (or governments) buying the item.

Next is a period of refinement ... standardization of production methods, improved efficiency, cheaper materials. Entire industries can be created during this process, and the end result is typically a cheaper, but still bare, product available to the masses. Please note, however, that if the original customer of the item is a government, it is frequently unnecessary to go through this process, and the item remains in the hands of the government or major corporations.

The next step is to come up with desirable frills. Again, they start off expensive and are marketed to those who can afford it.

And the last phase is, again, making the new, full-featured product cheap enough for the masses. This is the point at which consequent innvoation just explodes.

ENIAC on one end, Napster's peer-to-peer software architecture on the other. Gramaphone on one end, pink leather-sheathed Ipods on the other. Otto's and Daimler's gas engines on one end, rural power generation and food transport adequate enough to support large cities on the other. Cameras. Cars. Computers. Boats. Airplanes. Telecom. Books. Electricity. Plumbing supplies. Fertilizer and farming equipment. Anything made of steel. Anything made of plastic.

And the future of space flight.

And all because a few "selfish" rich people found it worthwhile to buy something during the expensive steps. So really ... cheer loudly for every expensive purchase you consider frivolous, or give silent thanks to the value they provided to get rich and their invaluable contribution to the things you and your descendants will enjoy.

Or find a cave and some lightning-struck fire, and condemn to your heart's content.

Update: Hello folks from Instapundit. Welcome to my formerly quiet hole in the wall. Just to clarify Glenn's characterization of my position ... it's not that I thought that he was approving Smith's analysis. It's that I thought he was either approving Smith's analysis OR providing both soapbox and audience to his adversaries. I could not understand either act. Regrettable confusion ensued.

New Things to Read

I've added a few links to the list of things to read. I'll just mention a few of the articles I found worth noting...

Making Developers Cry Since 1995, which gave me the link to The Braidy Tester, mentions a number of things that testers and, therefore, application developers should be testing. There were a number of things I had not considered and did not know ... for instance, the fact that Windows has filesystem reserved words allowing access to, for instance, com ports. And the picture is particularly disturbing. The prior entry's reference to James Shore's Change Diary, a nineteen week effort to introduce aspects of Agile development in to a waterfall environment, is also an illuminating read. My own efforts toward this end have been more subtle and even more indirect, so it's reassuring to see some success documented.

CIO Magazine also has quite a number of good articles, and should be read if for no other reason than that it's reasonable to assume your CIO is reading it. Some of the items I found useful were How to Hook the Talent You Need, which describes both a shift in skill preferences for IT staff (a little overly optimistic, I think), as well as some of the things companies can be doing to acquire and retain good staff, and Tracks in the Snow describes other interpretations of failure and success with regard to software projects (although I'm not sure why we needed an article for this ... if you're in a waterfall shop, look at each step and figure out what failure in any one step looks like at the end.)

In other news, as a round-the-clock coffee drinker who has recently been introduced to the possibility that most commercial coffee is stale, and who enjoys the lack of effort necessary, during my somnambulant mornings, to use espresso pods, I am considering an automatic espresso machine. Any recommendations?

The Enticement of Vacation

My managers at the company I'm currently contracting with are quite interested in getting me to come on full time. To this end, they keep dangling the opportunity to have paid vacation in front of me.

Vacations for software developers are interesting things. The better and more essential they are, and therefore the more justified they are in being rewarded with some vacation, the less likely it is that they will have the opportunity to do so.

The difficulty is that they're probably on a project. If they take two (or more!) weeks off in the middle of the project, they've just impacted the project plan. They could plan for after the project release, but you rarely release on time, and a late project trying to wrap up is even more hectic and personnel-critical than before, so planning for that isn't safe, either. They could plan for a reasonable period after the anticipated release, to compensate for late release, but then you're in the critical, "oh my god we've got a bug so obscure that it didn't come out in QA or UAT and no-one else can figure it out can you help, please" phase. And the reason they're having to beg is that the company has already committed them to both support for the released project and preliminary design on at least one other project.

You might say, "just take the vacation, and be damned with the company." But software developers have the most ridiculous work ethic you are ever likely to encounter. What other industry do you know in which the production team regularly works 200-250% of their paid hours in order to compensate for management ineptitude?

It's not just commitment to the work, however, but also an aversion to forcing their colleagues to work harder in order to compensate for their lack of working. Unscrupulous management (and there are many, for a number of reasons) will use this to their advantage, blackmailing programmers by their own ethics. One of the managers at my last company (after several iterations of "put in extra effort, just for the next two weeks") actually pulled the "well, if you can't work on Saturday, your colleagues will just have to work harder to make up the slack" tactic.

And that's just the developers' personal drive. Let's not even go into the whole perception of not being a "team player" thing for actually taking a vacation in the middle of a project (or not working long hours and weekends, which is why they need the vacations in the first place.)

What it comes down to is that, if paid vacation time is your biggest enticement and the means by which you distinguish yourself from other companies, you might want to have some process in place (as a joint effort between HR and project management, perhaps ... or, better yet, project management and a travel agent) that actually makes the enticement worthwhile to your team. Otherwise, your programmers are going to do the math, discover that their hourly wage is more in line with the income for delivering pizzas, and that their most significant reward is useless.