[lbo-talk] IT innovation and "the Markets"

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Mar 4 17:55:50 PST 2009


At 06:04 PM 3/4/2009, SA wrote:
>There are two types of planning: (1.) planning-through-prohibition ("you
>may not build that strip mall on the edge of town - sincerely, the zoning
>board"); and (2.) planning-through-public-undertaking ("we need a subway
>system and no one is building one; let's build it ourselves - signed, the
>transit authority"). A market system with planning means that (a) private
>innovators may undertake profitable and socially beneficial innovations
>while (b) being prohibited from undertaking socially harmful innovations
>and (c) the public powers will undertake beneficial but unprofitable
>innovations. By contrast, under central planning, private innovators may
>undertake no innovations - even socially desirable ones - without
>authorization from the central planner, who solely bears the entire burden
>of ensuring that all feasible and beneficial innovations are actually
>undertaken. It's hard to see the benefit of that.

3. Workplace Democracy

I'm not a fan of central planning but man o man o man what a day for you buoyz to be talking about the virtues of the market. My entire week has been devoted to dealing with the supposed virtues of market planning and let me just say: there is a shitton of waste that goes on in private industry.

Remember, at least in IT, 70% of project fail. http://www.google.com/search?q=70%25+of+projects+fail&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

What that means is that, of the 30% that survive, those are the ones that compete on the market. So of those 30%, some niggling amount make a difference to anything -- not to mention the loads of crap that we create that we probably don't need.

A month or go or so, I noticed that google was devoted more page real estate to ads. Poking around: yeah, it's true. Hard times mean that google has to bring in more ads to turn a profit -- and support more failures! Poking around some more, I read that their new CEO (or something) has nixed something like 57 projects because they are failures. I can't find the link now, but here's a shorter list of projects you probably never heard about: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10143245-2.html

Somebody's paying for that.

At my own company, which is notoriously cheap and would never consider supporting so much failure, they operate, always, in the black. They built a brand new 20 story building, without a dime of debt. This is not a company that has in-house daycare like this (good read: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/business/05nocera.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1215324102-Tdpf2iWpBV2ae99gKwZ0Rg

best quote: "If you are shaking your head at this point, that's because you lack the proper understanding of Google's culture. Having conquered the Internet, Google's executives tend to believe that they can do pretty much everything better than everybody else ­ even day care. " the

Anyway, from my view, the wastage is huge. Some of can be chalked up directly to stupid business decisions. As an IT operations and web development staff, our clients are the sales people that sell our stuff. Sales people, a wise friend once told me, are two year olds. They don't know how to say no to anyone.

"Want a shiny coin little one?"

"Oh yes sir!"

"Hop in my car and I'll give you one."

"OH yes sir!"

Sales people have the attention span of a 2 year old, too. They are driven to sell, sell, sell and what they like is some bright shiny new object so they can pick up the phone and sell, sell, sell.

Which means a lot of ideas for adding bright shiny objects to our products are constantly put into the project hopper. We neeeeeeeeed something new! Now now now!

Do we have a cost benefit analysis? Nosireejimbob! I kid you not. And this is a company that has never operated in the red. (Its competitor, who's staff we've been hiring since the competitor is relocating, has related hair raising stories of what happened once they sat down and did cost-benefit analyses. The waste they'd engaged in previously was enormous. And yet they went on like that for years and years and years. Somebody paid for that.)

It's not just sales minded folk. It's also techies, when they get grooving on something techy and can't be bothered to ask themselves: does this make sense?

It happened just today. I'm sitting in a meeting and learn that a feature we offer has been broken for 3 months. A cron job failed because a third party service we used changed its process.

We only find out about it now. Why? Because NO ONE actually uses the service.

So, we all sit around yammering on about how to fix it, in our techy ways, completely obsessed with solving the problem.

But, but, but... I say, look, I talked with a product developer about this months ago, and he and management have decided that this feature is worthless to us. No one uses it. To boot, we're spending $15/a pop to get something useful to the actual customer -- and we have like 3/1000 customers who actually bother with the damn thing anyway. We spend $25k a year to service a handful of customers. Either we pass that cost on to the entire customer base, since the individual customers aren't going to spend $17/month for it, or we get rid of it.

Short of it is: it's a complete waste of time. There are better hills to climb. Let's do cost-benefit on the back of a napkin man and ditch this.

A couple of them were keen on this, but the folks totally into solving the technical problem because, by gum, you cain't put a technical problem in front of 'em without huge amounts of energy spent to master it!, they listened, barely, and then went right back to searching for their technical silver bullet.

I spent the rest of the day wrangling a project that had a similar backstory. A lot of dumb decisions, this time made by people certain that the UI -- the user interface -- had to appear a certain way. I argued with them on that one and eventually I was proved right about the wastage. Not because UI doesn't matter but because the particular project is for a part of our product that has to do with SEARCH ENGINES -- which don't give a crap about UI.

While deciding what to do about all that, they put the project on the backburner, and now it's been dragged out again, only with a gun to our head to get it done -- last week. And all because we wasted time on something that no one had wanted in the first place, because it got into the hands of people motivated by something akin to the technicians narrow-minded focus on the small stuff, it spun out of control with most everyone -- except me of course! :) -- losing track of the whole point of the project from the gitgo.

I mean, honestly, the waste in the private sector is massive, and not just directly as a result of profit-motive or corporate bureaucracy or the too many captains, not enough sailors problem or monopoly/oligopoly.

so, all this folderol about how wasteful central planning is which, in my estimation SA, you describe in a very one-sided way -- there are other alternatives, workplace democracy is one, the anarchists small, localvore type solutions another -- it just boggles my mind that I am not hearing the other side of this issue.

Again, I'm not a fan of the central planning SA described but then I don't think that's the only option.

shag

"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."

-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws



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