"Online digital music sales a bust. A column published in the latest edition of Billboard notes that the music industry has spent over $4 billion on online digital music sales, yet has made less than $1 million in revenue. [kuro5hin.org]

So we run a bunch of market tests whose unstated design criteria is don't do anything that threatens our current business models. We actively ignore user experiments that demonstrate demand for new models and label all these potential customers thieves. Then we start the lobbying process to persuade legislators to declare pi to be 3.0 (sorry that was another stupidity) -- to reverse the tide of technology innovation. Why is none of this a surprise?" [McGee's Musings]

McGee's commentary, the full Kuro5hin commentary, and the original Billboard article are all worth your time. I'd love to quote the entire Billboard article, but here's one point I want to make:

"Imagine an industry that has allocated (and mostly spent) more than $4 billion in funds on ventures that have thus far made back less than $1 million—globally. Think about it. Spending $4 billion to earn under $1 million.... [ OC&C Strategy Consultants] merged comprehensive fact-finding discussions with more than 50 players in the U.S. and the U.K.—including music labels, online music retailers, digital-rights management execs, and digital intermediaries or digital service providers—into a damning report, concluding that "paid-for digital music still accounts for less than 0.01% of sales in any market."

Now imagine how different things might be if the music industry had actually come together, recognized the market behind the phenomenon, and sunk that $4 billion into a partnership with Napster in order to create a single, legal source for downloading digital music. The five BigCos would now be raking in the royalties, rather than bleeding their books dry. There would even be enough money to go around to pay the creators of the content, the artists. Broadcast radio would be taking notice of the patterns of downloads and would probably play a more diverse playlist, which means even more royalties for the labels. The Napster site would have the street cred upon which the product was originally built, and the Napster logo would rival Nike's in terms of ancillary sales of t-shirts, hats, and yes, even shoes.

If they had praised Napster, rather than coming to bury it, Michael Greene's speech last night would have been very different. Even if they just charged $1 per song, which I'm sure sounds absurd to them, Greene could have noted that the three college students downloading 6,000 songs in two days had brought in $6,000. Wherever he got his statistics, if he truly believes that 3.6 billion songs are illegally downloaded every month, then charging just one measly dollar for each song in the above scenario would bring in $3.6 billion every month. The five BigCos would have already made back their investment by now and then some. Plus, they wouldn't have spent as much on lawyers, which would leave their coffers that much fuller, and Net Gens would aspire to work for the labels, not hack them.

In a parallel universe somewhere, the labels are toasting their decision to work with Napster as the best thing they ever did.

[The Shifted Librarian]

Maybe the strategy consulting firms should be recruiting from library schools instead of business schools.

10:49:02 PM •  • comment  

Information Wants to Be Worthless by Bruce Sterling

"But one scenario was way too far-fetched and idealistic, even for the likes of us. What if it turned out that the Net was just plain too much for business to handle? That it was downright toxic to free enterprise?...

Lack of money, though, is not stopping the innovation. It never did. The Internet now reaches half the population of the USA. It is starting big seismic rumblings in China, Iran, and India, societies that lack their own AOL Time Warner and therefore have some dead-serious uses for cheap global network communication. Worldwide, people use the Net for e-mail. E-mail never had a real business model, but it was one feature everybody always wanted. The Net is becoming the planet's water cooler. It's all about the schmoozing and the gossip." [More Like This WebLog]

And of course, libraries have been here all along. Information is most definitely not worthless to us.

[The Shifted Librarian]

great stuff by Sterling. Money will eventually get made by way of the internet.

10:43:50 PM •  • comment  

Online digital music sales a bust. A column published in the latest edition of Billboard notes that the music industry has spent over $4 billion on online digital music sales, yet has made less than $1 million in revenue. [kuro5hin.org]

So we run a bunch of market tests whose unstated design criteria is don't do anything that threatens our current business models. We actively ignore user experiments that demonstrate demand for new models and label all these potential customers thieves. Then we start the lobbying process to persuade legislators to declare pi to be 3.0 (sorry that was another stupidity) -- to reverse the tide of technology innovation. Why is none of this a surprise?

8:11:03 PM •  • comment  

About WITW, he quotes David Sutherland of the Maryland consulting firm Business Innovation Consortium: "You don't want innovation if you're hiring for fit." Profound and contrary.

The questions of the Attention Economy now apply to managing employees, designing work, and to the tools you provide to your workers and partners. Just as you compete for the attention of your customers, you must now compete for the attention of your workforce, on the job and off. How well do you do?

4:29:55 PM •  • comment  

I was part of a new business team, about ten years' ago, that designed a family of technologies for attaching data transponders to objects. The idea was that each item would broadcast a unique ID we called a "shingle," like something you hang outside your store. Users could navigate malls, the Pentagon, or Disneyland with handheld audio units or displays containing a regional directory, sorted (frequently) by proximity. Physical transponders gave way to virtual shingles, data in a detailed map, with GPS-driven lookups. Now available for rent at Disneyworld as an enhanced guidebook.

Strictly surfing; one-way communication.

The power of human peer-to-peer ("Where are the kids?", "Mom, can I stay on A-deck another hour?", "Medic!") and chronicling (audio and data annotated photo essay of my visit/meetings/project) definitely call for CMS. 

Many systems exist for attaching electronic, radio-aware IDs to things like shipping containers, to aid in tracking. Most containerized traffic through US ports is tagged electronically. Some also contain special sensors that measure treatment (was the package shaken or jolted beyond what the contents can take) and conditions (temperature extremes, air pressure extremes).

The record of travel lives in information systems that sense a tag at various checkpoints (shipper's dock, port entry, shipside berth) and assemble a history. With an embedded weblog, the tag could tell a more complete and integrated story. 

Embedded weblogs; an interesting direction.

[diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology]

This reminds me of an observation that Clay Christensen makes in The Innovator's Dilemma that the truly disruptive innovations are the ones that assemble a series of existing technologies into a new pattern.

4:29:24 PM •  • comment  

Klogs need culture.. Steven Vore makes a few good observations about socializing a workforce into knowledge-centered culture, spinning off a post by Amy Wohl.  He poses the problem of aligning KM with self-interests, aligning metrics compensation and recognition with KM behavior. Both agree that tools must be enveloped by KM-specific KSAs (knowledge, skills, abilities) and KM-positive cultural norms. The trio of tools, KSAs, and norms form an umbrella of prerequisites for successful klog adoption. [diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology]

We keep cycling around this issue in knowledge management. If KM stands or falls based on an organization's current culture, you can pretty much guarantee failure. Don't try to boil the ocean!

K-logs are one of the first KM options that can be implemented without requiring wholesale cultural change beforehand. I talked about this earlier this week (The Magic Number 300). You do have to find the spots in the organization, call them proto-communities, where k-logs are most likely to take root. But you don't need to fix the entire culture. Think of k-logs as similar to the first PCs that were smuggled into organizations in the early 80s. The challenge will be how to protect embryonic k-logging efforts when the organizational immune system kicks in.

3:44:18 PM •  • comment