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Malcolm Gladwell Challenges the Idea of "Free"
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jun 30, 2009 05:46 PM
from the crying-out-from-a-world-of-hurt dept.
from the crying-out-from-a-world-of-hurt dept.
An anonymous reader brings us another bump on the bumpy road of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which we discussed a week ago. Now the Times (UK) is reporting on a dustup between Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Recently Gladwell reviewed, or rather deconstructed, Anderson's book in the New Yorker. Anderson has responded with a blog post that addresses some, but by no means all, of Gladwell's criticisms, and The Times is inclined to award the match to Gladwell on points. Although their reviewer didn't notice that Gladwell, in setting up the idea of "Free" as a straw man, omitted a critical half of Stewart Brand's seminal quote.
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News: Outliers, The Story Of Success 357 comments
TechForensics writes "Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is subtitled "the story of success." It is a book that purports to explain why some people succeed far more than others. It suggests that a success like Bill Gates is more attributable to external factors than anything within the man. Even his birth date turns out to play a role of profound importance in the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft Corporation." Look below for the rest of Leon's review.
[+]
News: Alleged Plagiarism In Chris Anderson's New Book 138 comments
ScorpFromHell writes "Blogger Waldo Jaquith alleges in his blog that Chris Anderson, Wired magazine's editor-in-chief and writer of The Long Tail, has apparently plagiarized content from various sources without attribution for his soon-to-be-published book. 'In the course of reading Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. ... Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia.' When questioned about the similar passages, Anderson responded, "All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources... As you'll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book's focus, mostly on historical asides, but that's no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced. I think what we'll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with.'"
Submission: The Real Difference Between Cheap and Free by Anonymous Coward
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Summary?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Summary, n.: a comprehensive and usually brief abstract, recapitulation, or compendium of previously stated facts or statements.
That is exactly what this slashdot post isn't.
Re:Summary?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Editor, n: a perl script used to push a slashdot article to the frontpage "as is" or with random perturbations.
kdawson.pl is widely acknowledged as the buggiest and least effective of these script.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Well it certainly was abstract!
Re:Summary?! (Score:5, Funny)
or my mother's / sister's definition:
summary (also summery), adj.: of or relating to the summer, esp. with clothes, e.g. yellow cotton dresses.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This seemed like a riddle, but I think I can make this happen even outside of Kentucky...
Father - Jim
Mother - Martha
Sister - Sally
Brother - You
A) Jim and Martha divorce.
B) Martha marries a new man - Joe.
C) Martha passes away.
D) Joe marries Sally.
Extended Summary (Score:5, Informative)
To try and make a long story short, but not too short:
Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson are, according to the Guardian newspaper, "Two of the world's leading thinkers". A title seemingly obtained from a long career of writing endless books about things no one really cares about, but everyone likes to have an opinion on.
Andeson is the author of a book called, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price", in which he argued that in an age where terabyte drives can be had for less than $100 , and megabytes of data can be whizzed around the tubes in seconds, a story or articles or other pieces of data only a few kilobytes in size can only be worth, well, nothing.
The spat began when , Gladwell, in his review of the book, became a bit, harsh, in his critques of Anderson, calling his arguments "pithy"(sic!) and "uncompromising", and generally regarded Anderson's arguments as lacking in substance(my word!).
Unfortunately, this rather vicious assault came at a time when Anderson was recently caught plagiarising material, and worse from Wikipedia, so he must have felt a need to defend his intellectual honor from Gladwell's slights. He therefore promptly responded with am open letter titled "Dear Malcom: Why so threatened?"
At this point everyone in the playground let out a collective "OOOUUUUHHHHHHHHH!!!" and someone was heard to yell "Fight!". Needless to say, this sort of hubbub is rarely seen in such great intellectual circles, and the social clubs are just brimming with gossip about the scandal.
The Guardian, ever the vigilant reporter of great matters of state, has dutifully brought the matter to the attention of the greater public. In addition, their great commentator Murad Ahmed, has already declared that Gladwell "wins this one on points", which is certain to stir things up a bit.
It's all so exciting! Wouldn't you agree?!
Parent
Re:Is the real story ego? (Score:5, Insightful)
My take is that Gladwell is post-peak and he knows it.
Give him a little bit of credit, at least try to address his arguments.
They're both rather accomplished bullshit-pop-sociology writers, but the real disagreement has a lot to do with their style. Anderson is like Tom Friedman and Ray Kurtzweil, in that he is a messianic This Is The Future pop philosopher-type, and tends to construct his argument around absolute, theoretical propositions, and asserts his case as if it were inescapable physical law. He writes like an Austrian Economist or a Straussian. He is a structuralist.
Gladwell is the skeptic. All of his books have mainly focused on picking-apart the assumptions of structuralists; you think entrepreneurs are the movers in an economy, he puts up 10 reasons why it isn't so simple. You think hockey teams always select the best roster of players? Outliers is about how social institutions are highly irrational in identifying the successful. You think people make rational decisions at all? He wrote a book called Blink where he calls it all into question.
I'm not saying he's right, it's just his MO. When he sees a book like Free, that makes Big Important Statements about How All Of Us Order Our Lives, it's bait to someone like him.
Parent
Spelling Nazi warning... (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, you're from Crete? I'm not, so I suppose I must be allowed into the fancy clubs... :-)
I think the word you're probably looking for is "cretin", i.e. "a stupid, vulgar, or insensitive person : clod, lout" (Merriam-Webster [merriam-webster.com]). "Cretan", properly capitalized to boot as it is in your comment, means "someone from Crete".
But if you are indeed a Cretan, then I suppose I must be a cret
Re:Extended Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Extended Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm surprised to seeso many college educated US slashdot readers act so aggressively to devalue the one thing their economic future really does depend upon.
I'm always surprised to see so many intelligent people talk about how the US economy is dependent on IP without seeing that as a problem. The devaluation of IP is a reality we're faced with, and insofar as we're relying on our ability to legislate artificially high prices and prop up obsolete business models to keep our economy afloat, we should all be terrified of what happens when all that fails.
Parent
1 headline + 1 paragraph = nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Could anyone understand that mess? Is this a book review? If I didn't know that "outliers" was a book, I'd be clicking past.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Glad to see we have editors who can't re-write a summary so that it actually means something to 99% of the people out there.
What is your problem? (Score:2)
The item is reporting a Times article, along with some related links. The issue is a familiar one and the language perfectly grammatical. What's the problem?
To be fair (Score:4, Funny)
Information doesn't want to be free... (Score:4, Funny)
Please, not Malcom Gladwell (Score:3, Funny)
FACT: Chuck Norris is the only one who can read Malcom Gladwell without losing brain cells.
But even he loses one.
Malcom Gladwell is apparently a giant midget (Score:2, Funny)
wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
1000 times taller than the average human and still classed as a midget?
Captain Obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I love how this guy discovers the obvious and then gets people to buy his books.
Well, his talent is that he can talk. His ideas aren't "obvious"; in fact, I sometimes doubt that he is correct. His books don't employ the level of rigor that Freakonomics, for example, uses. But he has interesting ideas and explains them well. That's why his books are best sellers.
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The biggest point, in my opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Anderson is kind of stumbling upon a point an MBA told me once, that given enough time, all new technology becomes a commodity. There are a dozen word processors you can choose from, a dozen different types computers, a dozen types of memory to choose from, hundreds of flash game sites (which are free, but 20 years ago people paid real money for games just like those). So for the most part, things will get sold for a little more than the cost to create them (the MBA then went on to tell me a number of different techniques to 'lock in' customers to your product: trapping users with file format was one, there were many other more devious methods, and Microsoft uses many of them. I don't underestimate quality MBAs anymore).
What Anderson is saying is that more and more, marketers will use freeness to suck users in. This is actually common knowledge among marketers, they've been playing with 'free' for years, and they are really excited about it, and talk about it amongst themselves, and to anyone else who will listen. Basically Anderson is right.
What Gladwell is saying is that you still need a way to cover your costs. Basically he is right as well.
They are both right, and what's more, if you asked an MBA about this, they might wonder why you are arguing about such basic ideas. And if you ask nicely, they'll tell you tons more about things you never even thought of.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Will Google as a whole be able to recoup value (financial or strategic) from Youtube?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There are more specific questions about how they could gain value from YouTube. Will Google, which reportedly uses a homogeneous infrastructure for all of its apps, learn important and valuable lessons from hosting a popular high-bandwidth site on that infrastructure? Will they gain important mindshare in other markets because of it? Will they learn important rules about search, user interaction, or advertising markets which they can apply to other services they offer?
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N
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.
Gladwell's writing abilities keep improving, his latest book being way better written than The Tipping Point. Who the heck is this Anderson guy and why can't he write in meaningful sentences?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not true. You are considering only new hardware.
However, not far from my house is a technology recycling warehouse. For some labor or a donation, you can pick up essentially free parts and build a machine of your liking. People use it for all kinds of projects, from PCs to hybrid microcontroller projects.
Most of the new technology replaces something, pushing it into the used stream, then finally the waste stream. However, even outdated technology has uses. It's basically free an
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However, they have infrastructure costs of somewhere around $300 million a year, which they haven't been able to cover with advertising.
According to this article - "YouTube May Lose $470 Million In 2009" [multichannel.com]
According to the firm's analysis of YouTube traffic and ad strategies, the site is on track to generate about $240 million in revenue in 2009, up about 20% year over year.
But the cost of bandwidth, content licensing, ad-revenue shares, hardware storage, sales and marketing and other expenses will total about $711 million, putting YouTube squarely in the red, the Credit Suisse report estimated. Bandwidth accounts for about 51% of expenses -- with a run rate of $1 million per day -- with content licensing accounting for 36%.
To arrive at the estimated $360 million bandwidth tab for YouTube, the analysts assumed the site will receive 375 million unique visitors in 2009 and that a maximum of 20% of those users are on the site at any given time. Credit Suisse's analysis then assumed each user downloads a video at 400 kilobits per second, to yield a peak bit run-rate for YouTube of 30 million megabits per second.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I understand the nature of something that I accept for "free" then I have consciously made a decision to spend whatever personal effort is required to extract some value out of this "free" thing. Does my effort make the thing less "free"? Presumably, I know what I'm doing and still think its worth the price of my personal effort. This decision
YouTube does not have to make money (Score:3, Insightful)
It is common knowledge that has been confirmed by various higher-ups at Google over the past few years, that as far as Google is concerned, "What is good for The Web, is good for Google". Google spends hundreds of millions per year on various free giveaways that it will not now or probably ever recoup costs on - things like Chrome, supporting Firefox, YouTube, etc.
Why does it do this? Because the more people utilize the web, the more it becomes the center of their daily lives, they more they will rely on Go
Wikipedia, wtf? (Score:2)
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I don't think Wikipedia was slashdotted because I can confirm I got the error message shortly before the story was posted when I tried to look up an article.
Unless of course, the Firehosers slashdotted it. Do we still have the Firehose? I mean, a real Firehose, that like, doesn't look like a psychedelic trip that crashes your browser and has no option to revert to a pre-sharkjump format?
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Nah, Jimbo probably just censored it.
Matthew Yglesias' take (Score:5, Informative)
Political analyst Matthew Yglesias over at CAP has a fairly good take on both the book and the review [thinkprogress.org] at the CAP web site.
sPh
Matthew Yglesias' take: Summary (Score:3, Interesting)
Damn, you beat me to it. To your link [google.com], I'll add the abstract of his post:
Where Anderson goes off the rails is his suggestion that the "give it away" business model is actually a promising business model.
Competition is good for customers because it destroys profits. The way you make real money is by getting into situations where you're insulated from competition. Meanwhile, as market sectors turn to a Free business model, they're just going to become way less lucrative.
Example: YouTube loses money. But since
Hack vs. the Void (Score:4, Interesting)
Malcolm Gladwell is one of those people, not precisely stupid, but so shallow and lacking in insight that he makes Chris Anderson, who is simply a hack, look brilliant by comparison. Gladwell, lest we forget, specializes in gushing soft journalism pieces on people whom he has designated as "great". He's what I call a Mensa bottom feeder - he produces work for people who like to think about how smart they are, which is not how actually-smart people spend their time.
Gladwell wouldn't know what to do with an actual idea if he had one (I envisage a dog with a great piece of artwork [walrusmagazine.com], sort of chewing on it.) Now, Anderson's piece is competent hackery, which is better than most people could do I don't mean this critically, but something about it intersects with the sort of faux-highbrow pablum that Gladwell thinks he understands. This is very threatning to Gladwell - going back to the dog analogy, it's like he's got some glimpse of a world of ideas and there's a threat to him there that he can't really understand. Gladwell is getting good money to stick his nose up Bill Gates' behind and there's an army of other dogs willing to do that for free. So he lashes out in a rage, and since he can dimly percieve Anderson (but not the more interesting and provocative people whose work Anderson has extended), Anderson becomes his target.
Again, I have nothing against a competent hack. But I do have some real criticism for Anderson - seriously, you admire Gladwell?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't admire gladwell, but tipping point was an interesting read. Not brilliant, but it felt like an interesting conversation with a friend who had one of those crazy but interesting ideas. It made interesting observations, but made a conclusions I didn't entirely agree with. However it made me think and look up things, people and ideas.
What bothers me about your post is that it says nothing. You have two paragraphs of cynicism, with typical array of cynical adjective: 'Mensa bottom feeder', 'Hack', 'Soft
Old news. (Score:3, Informative)
This is pretty much where this debate was during the IT bubble 10 years ago. Everyone was wondering how all the .coms were planning on making money when everything they sold was "free."
Of course, those services that truly were free didn't last, and those that actually weren't free and had many strings attached didn't last either, except the latter pissed a lot of people off in the process. Some managed to IPO and raise money successfully, but raising money and making money are different things, and in the end everyone lost except those who knew when to get out.
They should require by law that every company disclose how they make their money and how they cover their costs. This used to be obvious. Only recently has this become convoluted with all the "innovation" in the financial sector and with contracts. They should also require "simple commerce" without any non-upfront, opt-out type of fees.
Manipulation is not innovation. It is manipulation.
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Windows 7 RC -- because your time is free to Microsoft, and your data is less important than your Ballmer fanboi suckass score.
Offtopic flamebaits... (Score:2)
Guarantied to attract at least 8 fanbois since 1972.
As an added bonus, the above offtopic flamebait has people replying to it about the value of their time.
There is more unintentional comedy in this thread than in an average Turkish remake of a famous action movie.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate every operating system, each for its own special reasons.
Throwing your computer off the roof - Because your time isn't free
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...but gravity is :-)
Throwing your computer off the roof (Score:5, Funny)
Throwing your computer off the roof - Because your time isn't free
There are other reasons for throwing your computer off the roof. In the early days of Apple we had a little commercial system based on Apple Pascal that ran on a ][+. It was a true blivit in the classical sense, something sort of written that ran a part of the business until it couldn't anymore.
When we took it to the roof of the building and threw it into the parking lot, someone remarked "That's the longest it's ever gone without a crash". We used 11/70's from that point until they couldn't do the job either, but they were too big to conveniently throw off the roof.
Parent
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Linux - Because your time isn't free.
In having experience as a casual user of Linux with several distributions over the last few decades, I don't really see how the left and right half of this statement go together. I've spent far more time digging through newsgroups and forum posts and google hits trying to find answers to my Linux problems than I ever did with Windows. And I'm a computer programmer by trade and a former help desk worker and hardware debugger.
Windows sucks, but Linux sucks, too. The thing about Windows is that it typically
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Troubleshooting hardware was my biggest timesink until I switched to linux. Then things just started owrking.
That's just my experience but no more hunting for drivers, dependency hell (well not since I left Windows & Fedora 4), no more installing this and that just to lockdown a system to barely usuable.
I don't claim to speak for all users, but linux has given me far fewer problems over the years.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If you happen to happen to favor Windows, fine, so be it. Just don't assume that Linux is as hard for everyone else as it is for you.
FWIW, I just spent a chunk of this past weekend working on a friend's Win XP box, removing viruses and trojans, editing useless, orphaned crap out of the registry, minimizing the amoun
Re:The New York Times (Score:4, Funny)
Sing it with me now!!
"'Cause I've got friends in low places
Where the whiskey drowns
And the beer chases my blues away
And I'll be okay
I'm not big on social graces
Think I'll slip on down to the oasis
Oh, I've got friends in low places
Parent