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| Saturday, July 15, 2000 |
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Business is Conversation
After Dave brought Tom Matrullo's recent thinking about Napster to our attention, a trialog ensued, involving Bruce Steinberg, Tom and Myself (although Dave was cc'd by each of us). Email, especially with clever ripostes following quoted lines, doesn't translate so well to the Web. I just tried, and it's strange. If Tom & Bruce write & tell me they'd like this trialog posted, I'll do it. Otherwise, it'll just stay between the three of us. (What motivates me, by the way, is that both Tom and Bruce are terrific writers.)
My own opinion is this...
- For centuries music has been a publishing business. From sheet music to cylinders to vinyl, magnetic tape, CDs and DVDs, we stamped music onto a medium and sold it to customers. Since the finished goods were scarce and the means to produce them were capital-intensive, music became an industry. As we said in the Cluetrain book, industry understood and described its work in shipping terms. In linguistic lingo, its primary conceptual metaphor became BUSINESS IS SHIPPING (capitalizing conceptual metaphors is a linguistic convention, by the way). The shipping metaphor made sense, since throughout the Age of Industry production and consumption were often far removed from each other, and in mass markets like the one for music, goods moved from a few producers to a many consumers through "value chains" that spread like the branches of enormous trees. Thorughout that tree of chains we we understood business — especially big business — as one concerned primarily with moving goods. Our job was to create or add value along the way. In the music business, everybody — artists, studios, labels, stamping plants, distributors, warehousers, clubs, booking agents and retailers — all had roles in this business, which was (again, accurately) concerned mostly with moving goods.
- We may live in an Information Age, but we continue to rely on industrial concepts. The flywheels in our conceptual engines are too massive — and often still too relevant — to halt overnight. This is why we continue to understand business in shipping terms, even when value chains get shortened to a click or a handshake. Conceptual metaphors are extremly deep and meaningful matters. They may not do our thinking for us, but they do provide the terms we use to do that thinking. Thinking about markets as battlefields, for example, is very different than thinking about markets as animals, as environments or as conversations. One measure of the persistent power of BUSINESS IS SHIPPING is the dot-com world's insistence on reconceiving goods and services as "content." This reveals a nostalgic urge to stretch the BUSINESS IS SHIPPING metaphor across all kinds of stuff that frankly doesn't welcome it.
- The Napster Argument seems to happen between those who want to continue conceiving music as a scarce manufactured good and those who don't — or who don't want to conceive it *only* in those terms. I think there is middle ground here. Don Marti jokes that "Information wants to be $6.95." I think there is truth to that. Speaking of metaphors, the primary one for time is money. So we "save," "spend," "invest," "hoard," "invest" and "waste" it. Now let's drag this over to the music business. Are there infrastructural ways we can coerce payment for time? We do it in music clubs. How about on the Web? Another angle: can we infrastructuralizel the tip jar? How about a browser plug-in that tracks Histories, and lets us voluntarily go back and donate money to the musicians whose music we have used the most? I don't know the answer here. But I do want us to think about this from a new standpoint: the conversation between the parties involved. I think what Dave Winer and others in the XML community are doing starts moving us in exactly that direction, and it will be fun watching (and helping) it go there.
- A couple days ago our priest, Fr. Seán Olaoire, called out of the blue to heap praise on the Cluetrain book, which he finally read after hearing it mentioned twice at some high-level thinker's conference in Arizona. This was a non-trivial matter. Father Sean is one of the deepest and finest thinkers I know. He also has a vast knowledge of the Real World. He grew up poor in Cork, then turned his boundless curiousity first to mathematics and then to doing Good in the priesthood. He got kicked out of Kenya for bringing food to poor people after spending fifteen years working there, then came to the States to get his Ph.D. in psychology, which is now his day job. I asked him about traditional markets in the Third World, which are like the "ancient markets" we discuss in the book. It turns out that Seán saw far more relevance to "markets are conversations" than I had ever imagined. In traditional markets, he said, prices are always negotiated. "They can only be discovered through conversation," he said. The idea of a price tag is ludicrous to both vendors and customers in these markets. The idea that a vendor would have that kind of power, much less exercize it, would make no sense. It would be like talking to yourself. In fact, the price tag was invented by John Wanamaker not much more than a century ago. It's a modern, Western, industrial oddity. So now I'm thinking that perhaps business itself is a conversation — one we've divided into parts by morphing into a shipping system. We need to think about this some more.
- Like Microsoft and Howard Stern, Napster is a conversational black hole: a gravitational well into which everything around it falls and from which no light escapes. Drop it into a conversation and it bends or destroys almost everything around it. (There are exceptions. What Dave says about Microsoft in today's Scripting News is perfect example of gravity-defying insistence on perspective.) I have very mixed feelings about Napster myself. I love being able to find music I thought was lost to me, to hang out in other people's record collections, and to join conversations that would never happen otherwise. But I don't like the way Napster wants to make music abundant to clients while making its own server-based product scarce, just like AOL does with AIM and ICQ. There's something a bit, well.... inconsistent about that — mostly because they seem glad to protect themselves but not the record industry. Gnutella is more consistent (protecting nobody); but without a profit motive, Gnutella looks like a lot of other community-produced open source software: highly functional yet not so pretty where it touches the user. (Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder -- Outlook Express looks a lot prettier than Mutt, unless you're in the middle of getting work done in command line mode).
- We're in new territory here — one where industrial notions about property (as well as industrial metaphors about 'moving' it) start to look insufficient, irrelevant and anachronistic. In the manner of traditional markets, I think we need to negotiate an answer.
I've written before about the Patent mess. The links are in Reality 2.0.
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