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For the next fours years, any film released by Weinstein Co. will only be available for rental at Blockbuster (and especially not Netflix). What a stupid deal. I wonder what the filmmakers think of this, which will effectively limit the reach of their films (despite the positive spin Blockbuster and the Weinsteins want to put on this).
There’s evidence that the dot com bubble wasn’t all that bad. A study found that “the attrition rate for dot-com companies was roughly 20% a year, which is no different from what occurred during many other industries, such as automobiles, during their early boom periods” and that the market could have supported more smaller niche companies during that time. Also of note: the Business Plan Archive “collects and preserves business plans and related planning documents from the Birth of the Dot Com Era so that future generations will be able to learn from this remarkable episode in the history of technology and entrepreneurship”.
Via Tim O’Reilly comes this comment from Bill Burnham:
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at TIECon on the Search Industry. Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, made one comment in particular that stood out in my mind at the time. In response to a question about the prospects for the myriad of search start-ups looking for funding Peter basically said, and I am paraphrasing somewhat, that search start-ups, in the vein of Google, Yahoo Ask, etc. are dead. Not because search isn’t a great place to be or because they can’t create innovative technologies, but because the investment required to build and operate an Internet-scale, high performance crawling, indexing, and query serving farm were now so great that only the largest Internet companies had a chance of competing.
For Norvig to say what he did seems a little crazy, given the company he works for. The first time that search died was back in 1998. Yahoo, Altavista, Hotbot, Webcrawler, and other sites had the search game all sewn up. They were all about the same in terms of quality and people found what they were looking for much of the time. No one needed another search engine, and starting a search company in such a mature market seemed like folly. Around that time, Google became a company and eventually the world figured out it really did need another search engine.
Video of a Steven Levitt talk on the economics of gangs and why gangbanger is not such a good vocation (for one thing, the job pays less than McDonald’s). The board of directors stuff made me think of the co-op on The Wire.
It’s sad that the Silicon Valley tech scene and press is so fixated on building companies to flip that people need to write about sustainable companies as “a new and better model for Internet startups”. Good luck, Ev and company, in finding success on your own terms.
Phil Gyford has written a great beginner’s guide to freelancing.
Paul Graham on the 18 mistakes that kill startups. Some interesting stuff here, but heavily technology-biased (#6 Hiring Bad Progammers…what, everyone else on the team can be bad and you’ll still succeed?).
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a group of people trying to predict movie hits. As Andy notes, “the problem with their technique is coming up with every possible meaningful variable”.
The story of Friendster’s failure. By way of illustration, the people involved all blame each other for the debacle. I’ve gotta say, I loved watching Friendster fail…they were the poster child for stupid dot com companies during a time when that crap was all supposed to have been flushed down the toilet. “At MySpace, they rode the wave instead of fighting it [as Friendster did], and encouraged users to do pretty much as they pleased.”
YouTube’s popularity and recent sale to Google is hurting Universal Tube and Rollerform Equipment Corp’s business; their web site, utube.com, is getting millions of hits from misdirected video viewers and the companies regular customers can’t get in to purchase equipment.
Joel Johnson used to work for Gawker, recently quit, and started a smart blog about guy stuff called Dethroner. Matt Haughey noticed the quality and low level of desperation in the tone of the site (I find many of the blogs that are attempting to make money are clingy and nearly pathological in their need for attention) and interviewed Joel about the site. “So I’m just saying, I wish more people would just be happy making a modest living on the web, because I think that it’s pretty neat that it can be done.”
Screw Chevy: “It’s not OK to use images of Rosa Parks, MLK, the Vietnam War, the Katrina disaster, and 9/11 to sell pickup trucks.”
Update: In a hamfisted tribute on the occasion of her death, Apple posted a Rosa Parks “Think Different” ad on their home page. (thx, mark)
Danny Meyer on the difference between service and hospitality: “Service is delivering on your promise. Hospitality is making people feel good while you’re delivering on that promise.” Meyer has a new book, Setting the Table, out tomorrow. (via eater)
Michael Kinsley: do newspapers have a future? “Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies are on the way out too depends.”
How GM and the other big US automakers are hamstrung by their dealers. It was their own fault, though. They misued the dealers and the dealers responded by gaining all sorts of regulatory protection that severely limits what the car companies can do.
Big movie stars may not have that big of an effect on a movie’s profit as the film industry thinks. “Looking across a sample of more than 2,000 movies exhibited between 1985 and 1996, they found that only seven actors and actresses — Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jodie Foster, Jim Carrey, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams — had a positive impact on the box office, mostly in the first few weeks of a film’s release.”
Henry Abbott reports on what he’s learned about William Wesley, a behind-the-scenes power player in the business of basketball. “Enter William Wesley. How’s this for a resume? He was right there in Michael Jordan’s ear. The whole time. ‘Wes’ helped pull off one of the great feats of modern legend-making. He held the hand of one of the NBA’s less likable characters — an angry, cussing, yelling, gambling, adrenaline addict with some sort of over-competitive personality disorder — as he became the most successful pitchman in sports history, complete with his own animated children’s movie.”
Malcolm Gladwell on how the demographics of companies affects their financial health. At the time of its bankruptcy in 2001, Bethlehem Steel “had twelve thousand active employees and ninety thousand retirees and their spouses drawing benefits. It had reached what might be a record-setting dependency ratio of 7.5 pensioners for every worker.” More from Gladwell on the piece here and here.
Surowiecki on the difficulty of short-term thinking in business. “It’s no wonder that management theory is dominated by fads: every few years, new companies succeed, and they are scrutinized for the underlying truths that they might reveal. But often there is no underlying truth; the companies just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
The story of Zingerman’s Deli and how the company expanded while remaining local and committed to its ideals. The author of the article wrote a book called Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big and Zingerman’s co-founder Ari Weinzweig was a speaker at Taste3.
Jeff Bezos invests in 37signals, making them bigger and a little less Real. But seriously, I had always wondered how 37s was going to grow and this is a bit of an answer to that question. Congrats, guys. (thx, steve)
Update: Tom has some thoughts on Bezos’ next investments, most likely 31functions.com, 25description.com, and 19options.com.
Boing Boing has information on YouTube’s recently revised Terms and Conditions, which now state that they can use uploaded video for pretty much anything they want. For some users, that may be a steep price to pay for “free” bandwidth. The longer term question is, can YouTube find a business model that won’t completely screw up their wonderful offering or will they ultimately go the way of Napster?
The one red paperclip guy has completed his quest to trade a single red paperclip for a house. Listen all y’all, it’s arbitrage.
US college students won’t download music provided by their schools even though its free because they can’t take it with them after graduation, won’t work with Apples, and can’t play on iPods. That’s not really actually “free” then, is it?
Accidental Tech Entrepreneurs Turn Their Hobbies Into Livelihoods, including Dooce, the Trotts, Josh Schachter, and the Digg folks.
New Yorker review of Chris Anderson’s new book, The Long Tail. Oddly, there’s no disclaimer that Anderson works for the same company that publishes The New Yorker. Not that the review is all synergistic sunshine; the last half pokes a couple of holes in Anderson’s arguments.
Interview with Jim Buckmaster, who gives us an update on what Craiglist is up to. “If I look across the Internet at the big Internet companies, there’s a large proportion of their staff that are devoted in various ways to trying to maximize revenue. Those employees I don’t think are delivering much bang for the buck to the end user.”
Mark Glaser to the NY Times: “Chairman Sulzberger, if you seek peace in cyberspace, if you seek prosperity for your company, if you seek to spread ideas online: Come here to this TimesSelect gate! Mr. Sulzberger, tear down this pay wall!” A rebuttal. My take: TimesSelect is a perfectly good business decision for the Times. I just think the alternatives are better business decisions.
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