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Saturday, November 12, 2005
Peter Drucker, RIP 
| | Now I have to add Peter Drucker to the growing list of gurus I always wanted to meet, but never will. He died yesterday in Claremont, California, at 95. |
| | Drucker, more than anybody else who ever lived, separated business from the belief that the first concerns of corporate fuctioning are command and conrtrol. The notion that management was about getting people to work together, and not just telling them what to do, was a radical and important message to business after World War II, which had been experienced as a victory for command-and-control by industry as well as by the military. |
| | Drucker taught that managment was more akin to conducting an orchestra than to commanding a military unit or operating a machine. To him the strengths and contributions of individuals were more important than the titles on org charts. |
| | He was nobody's fool, and he took The Long View to a personal extreme, writing and speaking often of historical precedents which it seemed only he had studied — or remembered personally. |
Yo, Libraries: say No to DRM
| | The Alamance and Chatham County Public Libraries will begin offering free audiobooks downloadable to your home computer and playable on your personal MP3 player, beginning July 1. |
| | Library patrons may download up to 10 books at a time, for a 3 week borrowing period. Audiobooks may be renewed once, just as with any library book. All audiobooks are unabridged, so patrons won¹t miss a word and won¹t have to keep track of audiocassettes or CDs. Traveling with audiobooks just got much easier. |
| | To begin using this free service, patrons will need to visit one of the Alamance or Chatham County Public Libraries to set up a free account with NetLibrary. After that, they can log-in from home (www.netlibrary.com)and choose books from the hundreds of popular titles available. Sharyn McCrumb, Stephen King, and Sandra Brown are just some of the authors patrons will be able to download. |
| | Most MP3 players are compatible with this service, but due to copyright compliance problems, iPods notably are not. For a list of compatible MP3 devices, or for further information, please contact your local library. |
| | That last item is the chocolate-coated spider. No iPods? "Copyright compliance" problems? wtf? So I looked around. The NetLibrary site is freaking useless. It's not even a good brochure. It's just a login window, basically. I finally got the answer from David Rothman at the TeleRead blog. The post begins, |
| | County library officials eagerly offered patrons a new service in February: For no charge, readers could download more than 700 digital audiobooks to listen to on their computers and portable players. |
| | Such books, library director Edwin S. Clay III said, "allow you to take your reading anywhere." |
| | Apple's iPod does not use Windows Media Player, as the audiobooks are designed to do. (AP) |
| | But the library system inadvertently was caught in a clash of competing software that has left many patrons unhappy because they cannot use the service. Owners of the top-selling digital player, the iPod made by Apple Computer, cannot download books off the library's Web site because the county's service is incompatible with Apple's proprietary software. |
| | "I was taken aback by the vehemence with which iPod users reacted," said library spokeswoman Lois Kirkpatrick. |
| | What's truly frustrating is that audio books for libraries are essentially a Microsoft turf when it comes to formats. OverDrive, a NetLibrary rival, uses Windows only. And although libraries can lend out iPods preloaded with Audible offerings, this audio books company now lacks a system through which libraries can let patrons download the books from the Net. |
| | By design, podcasting took a poison pill at the very beginning of its life that made it impossible for the corporate types to subvert it without fundamentally changing what it is. That's why I was sure that Audible wasn't doing podcasting. |
| | Basically MP3 can't be rigged up to serve the purpose of advertisers, and that's why I love MP3. And only MP3 provides the portability and compatibility that users depend on. Any other method will force them to jump through hoops that they will resist. |
| | David Berlind added a third circle at a conference earlier this year (can't find a link right now) when he said that Microsoft had pretty much established a monopoly on the video side with Windows Media, while Real, QuickTime and open formats like MPEG-4 were getting less and less support. |
| | The problem, of course, is DRM. Here Apple's iPod is hardly a saint. Yes, it plays MP3s, but it's also the proprietary hardware end of the proprietary software and merchandising system called iTunes. Without iTunes, iPods are pretty useless. So are the tunes one buys through the store, which are encoded in the otherwise open AAC format but are rigged to run only on the computer that downloaded them and its associated iPod. This is no different, essentially, than the NetLibrary system. Two closed systems, two silos. |
| | The first problem here is that too many producers of "content" can't a system of controlled distribution that doesn't damage either the goods or the marketplace. They're still stuck in the dark-age state Craig Burton described in January 2001: |
| | While what we have is a miracle-grade advance over what we knew a decade ago, it¹s still profoundly limited. In fact, it¹s so limited that in some cases the best we can do is leverage the worst from bygone ages. |
| | Take the firewall. Nothing exposes the feudal nature of our enterprises more than the firewall: the modern expression of a city-state in constant hyper-vigilant siege mode — a castle with stone walls, turrets, parapets, a moat and a drawbridge through a single entrance under a threatening portcullis. What could be more static and retro? |
| | That castle is what libraries buy into when they buy into closed castles like NetLibrary. The better thing to tell library card holders is "We're not going to offer digital audiobooks until the rightsholders get their fears out of the way and offer something that's as open and works with every MP3 player." |
| | I think there's a fix to the DRM problem, by the way. As Craig recommended almost five years ago, it's infrastructural. And open. And when I'm finished understanding it, I'll share it. |
| | Meanwhile, back to Dave's poison pill. |
| | Podcasting is a perfect example of what happens when the market supplies itself. We chose MP3 because it worked on devices like the iPod, even though it was closed in other ways. And because it couldn't be closed in ways that matter. |
| | It's amazing to me that we're still only beginning to understand that free and open markets doesn't mean "your choice of silo". But we'll only understand it by making markets ourselves. |
| | And at that we're still at about the year 1480. |
| | Key piont: the silo-builders can't lead us out of the dark ages. They can help, but they can't lead. That's our job. |
Coincidence?
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