OK, we’re now deep in 1998-1999 territory with respect to Web 2.0 bullshit. Like the real estate crash, if you don’t see what’s going to happen in about 8-24 months coming a mile away you’re living under a rock.
Look at what’s on the top blogs, mang. Remember all those experimental psychology papers you’ve seen which make a pretty convincing, fairly scientific argument that people aren’t effective at multitasking? Disregard that and embrace meaningless phrases like connected mode: do stupid shit faster! That’s right. All the old facts (who has time for facts anymore?) are irrelevant. It’s different this time. Smug dipshits who can’t produce code wearing ironic t-shirts gather at parties and rub each other’s balls in a circlejerk of self-congratulatory praise. We are so awesome. We’re wiseguys. Everyone outside our incestual Valley echo chamber is a sucker.
Somehow, human nature has changed in the last three years: cool office + caffeine + slave labor = startup success! Or, alternatively: MacBook Pro + Rails + Ajax todo-list app = startup success!
Another forgettable blog proclaims non-chalantly: “…as businesses … get more productive to remain competitive…” The same message is everywhere: no one (an absolute) has time to do anything: (another absolute) read books (except masturbatory productivity ones), write coherent essays, or learn new things that don’t involve Javascript. The same people using motherfucking PHP talk about increasing productivity without a hint of irony in their high-pitched voices! Unfuckingbelievable!
OK, so proprietary vendor Z wants to lock users in to new platform C, which garners significant mindshare from developers busy locking people in to platforms A and B from proprietary vendors X and Y, and I’m supposed to be impressed? Ignore the fact that you can’t link to a single fucking thing in this RIA widget shit Z is pushing, and you can’t increase the size of the text, or use Firefox extensions on it, or do most of the things a web browser is currently useful for. Nevertheless: game-changing!
TechCrunch is a sea of forgettable names: PopSugar, Meebo, Cellfish, Jobster, Topix, Kiptronic, PicLens, Pixoh, Snipshot, Cumshot, Gazeebo, Dildo, whatever. That sinking feeling in your stomach and glaze in your eyes as you read those names is the knowledge that this has all happened before (and that it doesn’t have to be like this). Yes, it’s not as insane as it was during the first bubble. But there are still millions of dollars going after companies that can’t possibly actually have, you know, customers, revenue, the stuff that actually sustains business. This Valley-blog-startup-TechCrunch-iPhone-Digg bullshit is not indefinitely sustainable. Like Sarah Connor stuck in her Armageddon nightmare, you can pound against the fence and scream all you want, but the mushroom cloud is coming, man.
Look, you little Bay Area-dwelling, public transportation-using, podcatching, bespectacled too-cool-for-cool circlejerk pricks: calm the fuck down. Chill the fuck out and read a computer science textbook. Learn a functional/concurrent/logic programming language. Read Steve Yegge. Face the fact that your startup, rather than being “game-changing,” is boring and banal, just like most businesses; what matters is whether 
(Am I just jealous I’m not on the gravy train? Uh, obviously.)
Interpretation alert! I see everything through my eyes, so what you get is my opinion…
The high-priests of technology are imprisoned in their own self-important temples: languages, protocols, hardware, networks, and (of course) the next silver bullet that is supposed to change everything!
But nothing really changes. It cannot. Technology does not change business (or anything else, for that matter) until business figures out how to incorporate the technology into its business processes. Until business figures out how to move faster, be more precise, automate, increase production, or lower overhead with technology, that new technology is worse to the business than a Feng Shui salesman at the front counter.
Sometimes, business productivity comes after firing the geeks in the IT department and hiring some business people who know how to keep the servers running.
Very rarely, it comes from IT people finally figuring it out: that business is in business to do business — not feed the fragile egos of the IT staff and compliment them for being oh-so-techno-cool.
Unfortunately, the human ego craves compliments more than accomplishments. The current alter of the high-T-priesthood — whatever it is: Free-this, Umo-that, J-something, Mama-on-rails, etc. — is today’s holy sacrament and only that tasteless wafer will get you into the Holy-of-Molies… today. (Shelf-life not yet determined. Some settling may occur during shipment. Batteries not included. Depends on your level of technology. Not everyone can master this concept. When you finally grasp this paradigm. Those are the most wonderful clothes on the Emperor, don’t you think?)
The best IT resources a company can find are architects, designers, developers, data modelers, documenters, analysts, programmers, coders, and testers who know business, finance, and accounting. But those principles haven’t changed for 7,000 years and they just CAN’T be cool. It’s SOOOOO Old!
And it works.
And that’s why businesses use those same old, worn out, antiquated, boring techniques and principles. They work…
…as opposed to what the IT department is doing to so many otherwise-good companies.
But there remains the search for compliments; and techno-priests get their blessings from being first, being most cryptic, and knowing the newest techno-babble word (names) (what’s the difference?).
Therefore, since they echew business and disdain the conventional, they chase the 0.02% of the technology market (games and toys and the newest thing) with the expectation that they can capture that complete 0.02% of the market and make $10M next year (before they burn out, explode, or turn aseptic at their work stations and die of toxemia. Because that is the myth of the successful techology prince.
And myth is always more appealing than the hard realities of business.
(Except at the end of the myth, there’s always a dead demi-god. At the end of the business day, there are receipts to deposit.)
PS: Apply this same rant to the technologies of science, medicine, engineering, and all that other really hard or boring stuff that everyone ignored in college because there was an X-box party at Jim’s aprartment or somebody over at the computer center was hosting a speaker from California who was presenting another diatribe about Microsoft’s business practices.
Comment by jeff — June 27, 2007 @ 7:30 am |
OpenBSD could definately teach the makers of Mac OS X to keep their code up-to-date and secure, a lot of the bugs found to date in the Darwin base of Mac OS X is from the FreeBSD 3.x days, some date back upwards of seven or eight years.
Comment by John Dykstra — June 27, 2007 @ 3:32 pm |
I’d argue that people should not spend two years of their life building a toy operating system. Pick up a book on economics, journalism, the environment, history, etc. Technology is a means to an end and the days of startups emerging that adopt the “invent something cool just because it’s a fun gadget, not because it solves any real problem” philosophy are waning.
In ten years when geeks no longer have to configure xorg.conf to get linux working and we have standards based wireless broadband mobile, they will become extinct. Like engine tuners wondering what to do with electric cars. Geeks are going to have to actually learn about business and culture and good UI if they want to make something game changing.
Instead of geeks well be left with policy wonks. And the world will probably be better off when brainpower shifts from iJunk to public policy.
Comment by KirkH — July 22, 2007 @ 2:10 pm |
yo dude, nice rant =)
do you have family or other obligations holding you back from joining the “circle-jerk” ?
i just took the plunge a few months ago. SF is pretty cool, but it’s no wonderland-picnic. you feel really isolated from the TechCrunch / Bay Area startup scene when you’re in a place like Phoenix (where I was for a while), but once you get out here, it’s very easy to take it for granted and not even bother going to events/meetups/etc that are going on here.
Comment by Shanti Braford — September 18, 2007 @ 12:42 pm |
Isn’t the definition of a bubble the over-valuation of companies? It would seem, that as there is no IPO’s going on, there can be no over-valuation. Profitable companies, like Google and Yahoo (Yahoo is profitable, right?) are making investments and buying other companies that they think will increase their bottom line. So, sure, you’re hearing the same shit that you heard back in 98-00, but it’s a bit different because people aren’t believing all of it, nor are companies going public without first making money.
Comment by Rick — September 18, 2007 @ 1:57 pm |
first time at yr blog…you can write about peanut shells and i would read it.
Comment by ctbon — September 18, 2007 @ 4:03 pm |
As someone who has done half the shit you suggest, I don’t think any of it helps a damn thing. The only software that has a chance of acheiving any sort of sustainability is software that solves really hard problems. But guess what, solving really hard problems is really hard, gee, and takes a long time. So if you don’t want to do that, because you’re young and frightened or old and comfortabel, the only option that left if you’re an engineer or a VC is to go where the action is, meaning the business model du jour, to minimize friction and risk of individual failure. It was IPOs — reliance on naive market investors, now it’s Ads — reliance on traffic to drive revenue. Neither is sustainable for anyone other than the companies that run the stock market, and the companies that run the Ad service. Both of which, btw, are really hard problems to solve.
Comment by Alex Graveley — September 18, 2007 @ 4:10 pm |
Topix is not Web 2.0. Next time you make a list of shitty companies featured on TechCrunch please leave Topix out of the mix. The site has been around since before the Web 2.0 craze started and they are actually working on solving some pretty hard problems.
Comment by Matt — September 18, 2007 @ 8:39 pm |
I couldn’t agree more. I get tired of seeing the Ponzi schemes that pass for technology.
Rick, that the exit strategy is now acquisition and not IPO is irrelevant.
Comment by David Broderick — September 18, 2007 @ 11:30 pm |