Stowe Boyd

"@ckenton: 34 Percent Of US Mid-Market Businesses Using Business Intelligence Are Planning to Adopt..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:11:41 -0400

“@ckenton: 34 Percent Of US Mid-Market Businesses Using Business Intelligence Are Planning to Adopt Big Data Analytics; Lack of E… http://t.co/Re5gbo27”

- May 15, 2012 at 08:55AM via http://twitter.com/ckenton/status/202426882032021505

The Walking Dead?

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:00:09 -0400

The Walking Dead?:

TV advertising is up, but it’s a Ponzi scheme, like the increased revenue in movie theaters: in both cases, they are losing viewers but charging more.

David Carr via NYTimes.com

According to estimates reported by Reuters, in the coming week the big four broadcast networks and the CW will book some $9 billion in advertising revenue, with the big four up 2 to 4 percent from last year. And cable networks, which surpassed broadcasters for the first time last year in total advertising booked during the upfronts, are expecting a payday of more than $9.6 billion, an increase of 4 to 6 percent.

Part of what keeps legacy television in the game is that it is the last refuge of mass and reach. For retailers who want to flag a sale or an entertainment company with a weekend movie opening, a commercial on a broadcast network or a highly rated cable station can still hammer a message into a lot of noggins. In this targeted age, it’s breathtakingly inefficient — you pay to reach everyone, even the millions not in the desired age group — but making a big television buy is a kind of comfort food, easy and familiar.

Yet by losing audience, networks and cable stations have been able to force advertisers to buy more commercials to reach the number of viewers that they want.

“They have an interesting business model predicated on losing viewers,” observed Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media. “It can’t last forever.”

At some point, the laws of both gravity and economics will begin to pull down the upfronts, and with them, the fundamentals of the television business. Jeff Gaspin, who used to head entertainment at NBC, told Bill Carter that he and his son recently decided to catch up on a particular series and so assembled episodes from a variety of sources — iTunes, Netflix and the DVR. They saw all the past episodes in time to watch the final one live on AMC but found that commercials interrupted their experience.

So what show demonstrated to the former television executive that the old way of watching television was losing relevance?

“The Walking Dead.”

"Anything with a screen is a TV set, as far as I’m concerned."

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:48:59 -0400

“Anything with a screen is a TV set, as far as I’m concerned.”

- Glenn Britt, chief executive of Time Warner Cable, via NYTimes.com

MixMedias - Montreal

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:51:00 -0400

I’m doing the closing keynote at MixMedias - Montreal next week: Curation In A Liquid Media World

Curation In A Liquid Media World

The rise of several mutually-reinforcing trends — ubiquitous connectivity, mobile devices, web-oriented operating platforms and apps, and the explosion of the social revolution online — are converging to transform the fundamentals of media. I characterize that as the transition into liquid from solid, and so, we are seeing the emergence of liquid media. This will change everything, and will raise the role of curation to a new, central importance. We are seeing this first in the open web, in blogging and other media forms. But the greatest impacts will come when media companies adapt to these changes, and then, subsequently, as curation within the business becomes as critical as external community management is now.

Tympathy: Getting Into a Shared Tempo At Work

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:40:35 -0400

Had a fascinating talk yesterday with Deb Louison Lavoy as a part of my work on a new book, The Business Of Social Business (I hope to be done in June). Deb mentioned a term that she’d read in a David Brooks column, of all places. He reels off a bunch of terms that he thinks are critical skills for the new world we are entering (I leave the others for other posts, perhaps). One was not like the others, in that he attempts to repurpose a term that is in common everyday use, but cast into a new meaning: sympathy.

The New Humanism - David Brooks via NYTimes.com

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

First, I think that we do need a term to represent the ability to share a tempo with others. I think it *is* a key skill, or trait.

However, I don’t think it is easy to extend the meaning of existing and commonly used terms, and to basically shoulder aside their established meanings.

So I am proposing tympathy for this purpose (‘tym’ for time (sort of), and ‘pathy’ for sensing). (Note that I considered and rejected ‘tempothy’.)

Tympathetic people can naturally get into a groove with an established group, they find the natural rhythms of cooperation, and seem to sense the right time to ask a question, offer some insight, or shift course. And when this scales up to those connected in some shared activity, coordination feels frictionless, and collaboration seems less strained.

Effective groups will move toward a shared pace, either organically, or by following the tempo of a leader, or because of the explicit actions of some sort of metronome. They are also attuned to the tempo of the larger work context in which their work is embedded.

Work media tools — like Yammer, Chatter, IBM Connections, Podio, and Jive — are being rapidly adopted in the work context for a wide variety of reasons, but one major benefit is that they lay down a beat for people to build their work tempo around: they engender tympathy, which we all want.

My sense is that the very best work media solutions will support a polyrhythmic work environment. They will work at different tempos for different layers of work, ranging from the fast twitch pace of posting updates on today’s to do list, to the slower, deeper cycles in the business, like long-range strategic planning.

I also believe that organizations that are moving toward greater autonomy and distributed leadership will put a high premium on tympathy as an personal attribute. My bet is that tympathy has been important forever, but we just didn’t have a name for it and it has gone unexamined in the workplace.

"@Rafe: Author Daniel Suarez (“Daemon,” “Freedom”) at Augmented Reality..."

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:23:02 -0400

“@Rafe: Author Daniel Suarez (“Daemon,” “Freedom”) at Augmented Reality conference: “A lot of what I write now doesn’t stay fiction very long.””

- May 08, 2012 at 11:54AM via http://bit.ly/IOcNhv

A Web That Forgets

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:37:00 -0400

Megan Garber writes about a new iPhone photo app that will only share pics for a certain period of time — Snapchat — and suggests that the persistence of the web has it’s downside in that it cannot forget, and so we can’t either:

Forget About It: Making the Internet More Like Our Brains - Megan Garber viaThe Atlantic

Anti-archival tools provide a countervailing force to one of the defining features of the Internet: that, with its nearly infinite space, “save all” is its default setting. Without even trying, the Internet remembers. And that doesn’t just mean that the comment you left on that Joss Whedon fan site that one time is still sitting there, emoticon-ed and gif-ed and captured for posterity within the all-knowing neurons of Google. It also means that the web, as a broad space, operates on both an assumption and an architecture of continuity. Within it, and all around it, archive is assumed. Even when we die … there, still, we are.

So when we talk about the Internet, we talk about feeds and flows and rivers and currents — things determined by their dynamism and their lack of obvious containers.

And: That’s great! It’s what makes the Internet the Internet! The only problem, however, is that constant flux-and-flow is not actually how we humans are programmed to move through the world. We live in fits and starts, in cycles and phases, and we divide our time not just socially, in shared minutes and hours, but physically. We wake. We sleep. We have beginnings. We have endings.

I am intrigued by the poeticism of a time-stamped and eroding web, one that degrades and ages. Of course, unexamined in this piece is the truth that the web we have today *is* emphemeral and is fading all the time. Web sites go down, links get broken, domain names go unrenewed. Perhaps it isn’t happening fast enough for Garber, and its also true that some services on the web go to great lengths to fight entropy. That’s the sales angle of a Flickr Pro account, for example.

The way the web ages, though, is erratic and extremely heterogeneous. It’s like my recent 30 year high school reunion, where some of my compatriots could pass as 40 while others appeared to be septuagenarians. Time wounds all heels, as Groucho observed, but not at the same pace.

Garber mentions another service that is built around the notion on intentional transience, News.me’s new Last Great Thing, which sounds like fun, although the impermanent side of it may be more of an annoyance than high culture:

Last week News.me, Betaworks’ social news service, launched Last Great Thing, a time-limited version of Getting the News that asks participants to share just one worthy thing they’ve found on the web that day — permalinks not included. The product’s point is awesomeness-without-archive. But it’s also ephemerality-as-service. It allows us to do what our minds are, actually, optimized to do: to experience, to forget, to remember, and then forget again.

Not mentioned is the tiny webpage posting app, CheckThis, that formerly defaulted the expiration date to one month. They seem to have amended that to ‘never’ but the option to expire a post still exists. But clicking the button to select ‘one week’ seems like a form of asceticism, rather than accepting the ephemeral.

Might be better if I could simply sign up to a ‘erase.me’ service, with all my logins for all my accounts online, and to stipulate how I would like my web trails to be managed over the weeks, years, and decades.

I certainly would like a tool that would automatically sweep the files on my desktop into a timestamped folder every week, and to delete those folders several weeks later.

Sure, delete old calendar entries after a year (or maybe two?) Shred my email after five years (or maybe ten?). Retire my tweets after a few months? Keep anything I’ve favorited until I unfavorite? Keep all blog posts until I pass on, and convert into some version that is obviously the memoirs of a dead person?

It seems just as sensible as life insurance, and almost as sobering.

Could These Start-Ups Become the Next Big Thing? - NYTimes.com

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:26:48 -0400

Could These Start-Ups Become the Next Big Thing? - NYTimes.com:

I voted for Dropbox. See Why haven’t Microsoft or Apple built Dropbox-style sharing into their OS’s?

"@panklam: Collaboration tools exacerbate centrality of those already central @robcross #Ansummit"

Tue, 08 May 2012 09:52:19 -0400

“@panklam: Collaboration tools exacerbate centrality of those already central @robcross #Ansummit”

- May 08, 2012 at 06:45AM via http://bit.ly/IS31vZ

via futuramb

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:08:47 -0400

via futuramb

The Fall Of Facebook Social Readers

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:05:44 -0400

John Herrman dissects the news about the declining popularity of social news readers on Facebook, and points out the key observation:

Sharing isn’t really sharing if you don’t mean to do it.

He also suggests that Facebook’s rejiggering of ‘trending stories’ so they are segregated and pulled to the side of actual posts by actual people could be a devastating blow to companies like the Washington Post. Ryan Kellett, the WashPo engagement producer, agrees.

Social reader “collapse” is b/c of evolving FB modules. Before: “double-double,” 4-5 stories down in a list, w/ friend icon - drove growth.
— Ryan Y. Kellett (@rkellett) May 7, 2012

No surprise that the social platform shapes discourse, but it’s a hard reality for the papers who were holding out their Facebook stats to advertisers as confirmation of a social strategy and now they are collapsing.

Here’s the crash for Washpo:

OgilvyOne London: “As an ad agency, we’ll always be trying to lean forward” | Lean Back 2.0

Mon, 07 May 2012 14:24:00 -0400

OgilvyOne London: “As an ad agency, we’ll always be trying to lean forward” | Lean Back 2.0:

OgilvyOne London: “As an ad agency, we’ll always be trying to lean forward” - Emma Gardner via Lean Back 2.0

Has OgilvyOne London seen any evidence of people “leaning back” when consuming ads or creative content on their iPad?

[OlgivyOne London Chief Executive Annette] KING: It’s interesting because we were having a debate between lean forward and lean back before we got on the call with you. There’s a time and a place for both. The Economist app is a good example of a ‘lean back and consume’ type of situation. As an ad agency, though, we’ll always be trying to lean forward. We’re always trying to get people to take part in the app and engage with the ad. By definition, it’s an immersive kind of approach.

We’re really interested in the dual screen experience right now. By dual screen, I mean sitting in front of the TV with a tablet. You might be watching one thing on the TV, but doing something else on your tablet. And we want to start connecting those two things. If Jamie Oliver is making a special truffle recipe on television, you can use your tablet to find out where truffles grow in the world, or how to make Jamie’s recipe. You can get people involved through the second screen.

I wonder about ‘always trying to lean forward’: isn’t there a place for ambient advertising? Ambient awareness of other people (through Twitter or other social tools) is a back of the mind sort of attention scheme: you know what people are up to based on their updates moving by while you are doing other things.

I conjecture that ambient advertising could be very effective on the second screen. Imagine that as I am watching a cooking show, and I’ve enabled a second screen gear applet on my tablet. As the chef’s use various kitchen tools, the gear applet streams pictures and descriptions of the gear: this knife, this sauce pan, this stove. You might think that this is a lean-forward set up — that I am dedicating foreground attention to the gear streaming by — and I might do that the first few times I use the app. However, as I habituate to the app, I will begin to treat it as a lean-back stream of information, so my perception of the products being featured is more additive or cumulative. It’s just as much about brand building as a call to action.

Yes, there will still be times when I want to buy that particular knife, right now. But in general I think it will lead to a collection of brand associations built over time, so that when I get to the point when I want to buy a new knife, a few brands are in my head, and I choose between them at the store, or online.

If there is one thing that advertisers can do, though, to make lean-forward intimacy with products more likely on the second screen, it would be to make it easy to share product information and images with other people: wire it deeply into the social dimension of TV.

(For more on Social TV and The Second Screen, download the free Work Talk special report on that subject, here.)

Is Bezos Crazy Like a Fox, Or Just Crazy?

Mon, 07 May 2012 09:58:15 -0400

Nobody Seems to Understand What Jeff Bezos is Doing. Does He? - Farhad Manjoo via PandoDaily

Jeff Bezos once famously declared that, in the service of innovation and its long-term success, Amazon is “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” He was being a bit modest there; Amazon is not merely “willing” to be misunderstood, it often tries to actively sow widespread misunderstanding. This works it its advantage; if competitors don’t know what Amazon is up to, if they can’t even figure out where and how it aims to make money, they’ll have a harder time beating it.

But all this misunderstanding can’t be an unalloyed good. Amazon is so opaque, with so many mysterious businesses and revenue streams, that you’ve got to wonder whether the people who work there even understand what it’s up to. In business, simplicity often wins. Selling me a device to get me to buy a membership in order to get a book for free. Is Bezos crazy like a fox? Or is he just plain crazy? We have no idea.

But Bezos is involved in a land grab: he wants people to use Kindle and buy books from Amazon long enough to become a default standard. If he has to extract value from the publishers and authors of books to do so, he will.

Bezos is looking over his should at Apple (and more distantly at Google) who are developing the most dominant mobile devices on the planet, and he knows it is all converging. People — given their druthers — would rather have a single mobile device to do everything: read books, surf the web, write email, blog, social network (yes, I am using that as a verb).

So the only question is, why doesn’t he put a phone on the Kindle? It’s already a (bad) browsing device with an embedded whispernet data connection, so perhaps he is planning to give away phone service to Amazon Prime subscribers, too.

Web, City, Cars, Parking

Sun, 06 May 2012 08:52:00 -0400

As the web and urban continue to collide and build on each other, post-industrial concerns like parking will be managed in very different ways. Instead of the 20th century hunter/gatherer model — where people search for empty spaces to park — we’ll see hotel reservation models, autonomous vehicles parking themselves, and dynamic pricing algorithms:

The Networked Urban Environment - Jan Chipchase via design mind

Urban infrastructures are increasingly being equipped with sensors and other means of collecting information and channeling our everyday actions, from energy use to parking patterns, into software and networks that analyze data and act upon it. Cities—and communities— are becoming “smarter” as “the internet of things” evolves. What this means is that more and more people and things, including parking spaces are becoming connected, allowing for better prediction models of traffic and energy usage thanks to real-time data flows, leading to better awareness of current resource statuses and more practical matters such as more dependable payment mechanisms.

The smart-parking scenarios will arrive more quickly than you think—in fact, they’re already nearly here. On the most basic level, anyone can get free driving directions and an instant, estimated time of arrival from Google Maps, when they agree to share where they are at a given moment via GPS. Throughout Europe now, you can reserve public parking spots via SMS messages. In San Francisco, you can time a meeting so that you don’t pay peak-prices for parking, determined by a dynamic market pricing system launched as a pilot program this fall (and running through summer 2012) by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to help alleviate congested streets. It uses real-time data tracking to determining the cost of parking at 7,000 of San Francisco’s 28,000 metered spots, as well as 12,250 spaces in three-quarters of the parking garages owned by the cities.

And then there are much more intricate examples, on epic scales. In September, the technology company Pegasus Holdings announced it is building a $200 million test city on a city scale in New Mexico—from scratch, where it will try out networked parking and transportation systems among other infrastructure innovations. In Asia and the Middle East, smart cities are being built from scratch: Tianjin Eco City in China; Songdo, South Korea; and Masdar in Abu Dhabi. In each of these examples, developers are working to implement traffic-solutions that will make use of new, networked technologies, all as part of creating more energy-efficient communities.

These optimistic visions aren’t just about making parking a more pleasant experience. They’re largely about solving urgent problems in a time of economic and sustainability-related challenges. According to a report by IBM, the economic impact of traffic congestion is $4 billion per year in New York alone, in terms of estimated lost work hours, pollution-related costs, and wasted fuel. In the United States, traffic congestion losses are growing at 8 percent a year, the most recent estimate being $78 billion in 2005. Worldwide, in both developed and developing-world cities, traffic congestion-related expenses represent between 1 percent and 3 percent of most cities’ GDP.

And on a larger scale, beyond parking and traffic, a recent report by Ericsson (published earlier this year) found that the more networked, or “smart,” a city is, the more that city sees benefits to its “triple bottom line” (its financial, societal, and sustainability-related successes). For every 10 percentage points increase in broadband penetration, the report found, the isolated economic effect on GDP growth is approximately 1% of GDP.

Hiriko stackable electric car

As I wrote about not long ago, the percentage of major cities given over to parking (and cars in general) is preposterous. All these schemes for dealing with parking of cars are transitional, because ultimately the payback for eliminating parking is so high that cities will eliminate cars, or change them into something so different they drastically diminish parking (like stackable, foldable, autonomous cars).

"from: noreply@plazes.com to: stowe boyd email date: may 4 2012 subject: News From Plazes Hi..."

Sat, 05 May 2012 08:21:00 -0400

“from: noreply@plazes.com
to: stowe boyd email
date: may 4 2012
subject: News From Plazes

Hi stoweboyd,

Thanks for being part of Plazes. We hope you enjoyed the journey, past or present.

The time has come to say farewell, and next week, Plazes will go out of service.

From next week, you can go to Plazes.com and move your history to Nokia Maps. Your plazes will become favourites on Nokia Maps for your PC or Mac. Shortly after next week, you’ll also be able to sync your favourites with Nokia Maps on your phone.

If you like, you’ll also be able to download and save a history file containing all your activities and plazes.

With Nokia Maps, you can search for interesting places and find your way there with walking, driving and public transport directions. And if you find somewhere new on your travels, you can add it to the map, write reviews, post a rating and add photos.

If you have any questions, please contact Nokia Support.

Kind regards

Your Plazes Team”

- via email

Email yesterday from Plazes (Nokia, now), announcing they’re shutting down the service, one of the pioneers in the geomobile check-in arena. Just another example of a big company trying to buy into a new market, and screwing it up. Of course, the Plazes guys really stalled the company’s trajectory in 2007 with a terrible redesign, but — like Dopplr — a bunch of interesting ideas and smart designers were scooped up by Nokia, who failed to do anything with them at all.

The New iPhone: Size, Screen + New Connector (Plus iPod touch)...

Sat, 05 May 2012 06:56:30 -0400

The New iPhone: Size, Screen + New Connector (Plus iPod touch) By Jeremy Horwitz

Whether you call it the “iPhone 5,” the “iPhone 6,” or the “iPhone 4G”—well, maybe not the last one thanks to international regulators—the new iPhone is coming this fall, and we have some details to share. They match and expand upon details we received back in March, suggesting that Apple is abandoning the long-rumored “teardrop-shaped iPhone 5” in favor of another glass-bodied design.

What we’ve learned: the new iPhone will indeed be longer and thinner than the iPhone 4 and 4S. Approximate measurements are 125mm by 58.5mm by 7.4mm—a 10mm jump in height, nearly 2mm reduction in thickness, and virtually identical width. According to our source, Apple will make one major change to the rear casing, adding a metal panel to the central back of the new iPhone. This panel will be flat, not curved, and metal, not ceramic. Our artist’s rendition provides a rough idea of what this change will look like; it echoes the current-generation iMac design, to be sure.

Going from 3.5” to 4” is a really big step.

Lean Back 2.0, from The Economist — How tablets are...

Fri, 04 May 2012 15:51:00 -0400

Lean Back 2.0, from The Economist — How tablets are accelerating the liquefaction of media, and the rise of a new global psychographic: the mass intelligent.

A Quick Peek At Invy: A Calendar Coordination App

Fri, 04 May 2012 08:35:00 -0400

Coordinating times for meetings or calls is one of the most persistent headaches, and one that wastes time and energy. The best strategy is the following:

An organizer picks a bunch of possible times — presumably times when she is available — and sends those to others she wants to attend
Each of the invitees indicate which times they can make (perhaps penciling in the options to avoid later conflicts)
The organizer picks a time that all — or as many as possible — can attend, and sends out the chosen time to the invitees
The invitees and organizer put the appointment on their calendars (deleting the penciled in appointments).

This is theory, but in practice all sorts of wrinkles come up, and even in the best case the organizer is left leafing through a chain of emails trying to figure out who can make what times.

Invy is a sleek looking and easy to use iPhone app that is designed a mobile-first solution to this problem, or at least most of it. (Note that there have been a long series of other solutions, like Outlook, but leave that to one side).

The organizer has to use the Invy app, but the others do not: they can be contacted via email that links to the Invy website, where they can do their part of the dance.

Here’s the landing page on the iPhone:

I’ve created a Invy with two possible times to another of my email addresses to test, one not registered with Invy. I acted as both sides of the negotiation, turning down one time and selecting the other, and tried the chat: discussion is essential in these cases if you want to avoid email. At the end, on the iPhone side as the organizer, I picked the final time.

Here’s the web UI:

Invy added the event to the calendar on my phone automatically, after I — as organizer — selected the time/date for the meeting. I also received another email as the invitee with an .ics calendar file as an attachment, so invitees without Invy could import that to their calendars.

It all worked perfectly, aside from some minor UI issues. For example, when presented with just a single option for a meeting, it wasn’t clear how to say no. Turns out you have to agree to the time/date by clicking on a checkmark, and then unchecking it. Otherwise, smooth.

I would like to see a slight enlarging of the use case, if only for those with Invy installed. If I have proposed a variety of dates for a pending Invy I’ve organized, or if I have said that some time/dates are possible in an Invy I have received from another user, I’d like those to appear on my calendar as being ‘penciled in’. I use the convention of putting a question mark at the end of the event’s title, like ‘Dinner with Carlos?’, as a way to indicate penciled appointments. This would help me avoid booking something in one of those penciled spots while the Invy negotiations were still in process.

Also, there is no way as yet to indicate any preference across various time/dates, which is very common in coordinating meetings. Yes, a lot of that could be embedded in the chat, but a simple way to click on ‘better, good, worse’ on each might be helpful.

At any rate, leaving that elaboration aside, Invy is great, and I will be using it immediately. I am involved in a series of interviews for a project, where I am trying to schedule times with a long and growing list of brainiacs in the social business field, all of whom are just as busy as I am. This will help me immensely, although it’s a use case where the penciling feature would be extremely helpful, so I can avoid double bookings.

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

Fri, 04 May 2012 07:04:37 -0400

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

- Simone Weil

Being There

Fri, 04 May 2012 06:43:00 -0400

Marc Andreessen is the Chauncey Gardiner of the tech world, and has managed to juggle being there at the invention of the first browser into billions. But let’s not confuse luck with smarts, as Felix Salmon says (in a long-winded way):

The problem with Marc Andreessen - Felix Salmon via Reuters

It’s easy to admire Andreessen, a man whose disarming and engaging blog was a must-read during the financial crisis, when he would provide some very smart perspective from the point of view of a wealthy man, thousands of miles away from the epicenters of the crisis, who had some very sharp insights into what was going on. He then launched Andreessen Horowitz, and the blog became more of a public seminar in how to be senior management, which is great if you like that sort of thing. And it’s true that the five big ideas in the interview are all pretty revolutionary things, although I don’t think he actually had them all first.

But Andreessen has never really been a public intellectual. His single greatest achievement — the creation of the world’s first web browser, Mosaic — took place under the auspices of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. But ever since then he’s been a red-blooded capitalist, founding and funding a long series of for-profit companies, and becoming one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Silicon Valley in the process.

And when you look at Marc the capitalist, rather than at Marc the ideas guy, the hero-worship becomes a bit more difficult. I certainly like the way that he’s dragging Silicon Valley into the world of philanthropy, where it’s historically been very weak. But a lot of my own Wired story, last month, can be read as a push back against the IPO culture which Andreessen, almost more than anybody else, has managed to create.

“Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist,” I wrote in that piece, and Andreessen is Exhibit A if you want to look for such a person. His first company, Netscape, lost the Browser Wars and ended up getting sold to AOL. His second company, Loudcloud, was (to be charitable) too far ahead of its time, so it “pivoted” into something called Opsware; eventually Andreessen managed to sell it off to HP. His third company, Ning, was even less successful, and ended up buried somewhere in Glam Media. None of them exist today in any recognizable form; none of them ever made much money; and none of them even really made it as far as building anything approaching a permanent income stream.

Salmon takes his time dismembering Andreessen’s mystique:

Andreessen Horowitz does provide a bit of expert advice and name recognition, but at heart it doesn’t make anything at all; its sole predictable income stream is the management fee it skims off while investing other people’s money.

[…]

I’ve never met anybody who thought that Netscape was a good acquisition for AOL, or that HP gained much from buying Opsware beyond getting Andreessen to sit on its famously-dysfunctional board.

[…]

While Andreessen is very good at making money, then, he’s much less good at creating lasting value for the long-term shareholders of his companies. In his world, buy-and-hold public shareholders are the patsies, the people left holding the bag when the fast money has long since departed. He’s smart; the rest of us are chumps. I guess it makes perfect sense that he’s recruited Larry Summers as a Special Advisor.

Salmon suggests that we read Chris O’Brien’s 2009 piece sparked by the launch of Andreessen Horowitz, and I agree, because even more than Felix, Chris makes a compelling case that Andreessen’s mystique says more about the Silicon Valley mindset than Andreessen:

Innovation can’t be sustained by creating a venture-backed Ponzi scheme where one money-losing start-up is sold to another, which is then sold to another.

Losing money indefinitely isn’t just a financial failure. It represents a failure to truly understand how a service or product is creating value for a customer, how to communicate that value, and how to persuade the customer to pay above and beyond for that value.

That, all too often, is where the valley still falls short: Failing to innovate around the business to same degree it innovates around the technology.

This isn’t Andreessen’s fault. But his ascension as the valley’s leading light embodies that ideal. And that shows the valley is no where near ready to change its ways.