A little while back, on one of our "funniest/most insightful comments of the week" posts, we featured a comment that someone made anonymously, in response to a story about Bjork's Kickstarter project that was taken down before it ended, after it did not look like it was going to get anywhere near the required threshold. However, the comment has stuck with me and I think it deserves a post. In particular, the commenter called us out for saying that her project "failed."

This was not a "failure!"

Platforms like Kickstarter have changed the way the market is functioning, and our ways of thinking about it (even here on Techdirt) have to catch up.

Bjork's campaign did not fail, even though the results were not what she was hoping for. She successfully learned that the market was not interested in this product.

Spending £375,000 of her own money? Now THAT would have been a failure.

Using Kickstarter is more like running a science experiment than it is like selling a product. It increases the efficiency of the market by orders of magnitude, and apparently beyond our ability to think about it clearly.

This point -- even if it was calling us out -- is so true, and it's so important for people to understand. It's easy to use the word "failure" for those projects that don't meet their goal. Hell, just in writing this post, I repeatedly had to consciously stop myself from using the words "fail" or "failure" in describing projects that don't reach their goal. But, the commenter is right: those projects are not failed projects once you realize what Kickstarter really is: a platform to judge the market for products, and to build commitment and funding around them. If a project doesn't reach the goal, that's actually valuable market research, suggesting that if they had gone ahead, without going through the experience, they likely would have "failed."

So, in actuality, it makes sense to look at such projects and recognize that they were saved from a dismal failure, in which large sums of money may have been spent, but at the same time clarifying the market's reaction to a product before it's even been introduced. With so many people thinking of Kickstarter more as a store, than as a platform for supporting people trying to turn cool ideas into reality, it's important to be careful in how we choose our language. Putting up a Kickstarter project that doesn't reach its goal shouldn't be seen as a failure. It should be seen as a useful bit of data, which helps one avoid failure, and also to (hopefully) sharpen up their product and pitch so that the next time, it is more likely to be funded.

Every few months, Google has been "shutting down" various offerings they feel are under-used, in an effort to regain some focus. Many of these are uncontroversial, though a few have been surprising and freaked some users out. Many, for example, were surprised and upset when Google announced it was phasing out iGoogle. But today's news that it is shutting down Google Reader took many, many people by surprise. My Twitter feed blew up with people freaking out about it. For those who use it, many really rely on it for their daily information gathering process. I know the feeling, because I used to do that -- though a few years ago I shifted to mostly using Twitter via a well-organized Tweetdeck, and found that to be just as (if not more) effective, though a somewhat different overall experience that took some getting used to.

Still, a very large number of folks I know feel like they practically live inside Google Reader -- and I know (for example) that Google Reader is a huge driver of traffic to this site, so I get the feeling many of you use Google Reader as well. The thing that seems to have so many folks upset is the fact that there really aren't any comparable alternatives if you want that same basic experience. In fact, you could argue that Google effectively killed off many of those alternatives. Back in the day there were things like Newsgator and Bloglines, but both were effectively marginalized or pushed into other markets because Google Reader really did become the de facto standard RSS reader that so many used and relied on.

Anyway, I have a few separate thoughts on all of this and might as well go through them bullet point style:

• This highlights the problem of relying too much on a single provider when there are few alternatives. As such, I wonder if Google may not realize the wider impact of this move. For example, it has me directly rethinking how much I rely on Google Calendar, Google Drive and Gmail. Now, I don't think any of those are going away any time soon, but not too long ago (um, yesterday, according to some...) you could have said the same exact thing about Reader. I'm now planning to do a more serious personal audit of services I use and how reliant I am on a single provider, and start making sure I have working alternatives in place and ready to go. In the end, this will certainly make me a lot less tied to Google's services, which is probably a good thing, but probably not the sort of thing Google is hoping its users will be doing.
• As mentioned, personally, I moved away from RSS readers to a purely Twitter/Tweetdeck approach to consuming news. It took a few months of doing both, but when I shut down the RSS reader, I never looked back. It's a different experience, but has some benefits. But, what that suggests is that if people are looking for a culprit for what brought us to this moment, Twitter is the prime suspect. Yes, Twitter and RSS are different in many significant ways. But, in terms of the basic user benefit that people get out of both ("my stream of news & info"), they clearly compete.
• The lack of serious alternatives represents a serious opportunity for someone enterprising. Believe it or not, before Google Reader even launched we at Techdirt had built our own RSS reader, called the Techdirt InfoAdvisor, that functioned quite a lot like Google Reader, but which had some other really useful features for us internally and for some of our business clients (we would use it to curate accounts for clients, with added commentary from us). Eventually, we shut it down, because (as Google has discovered), it's actually a lot of work to maintain something like that for a variety of reasons, and soaks up tremendous resources. Still, my first reaction was to joke that maybe we should dust off our old code, put it up and see if anyone wanted to use it. We're not likely to do that (unless all of you start throwing money our way), but someone else likely is going to jump into this space quickly. They may not build a huge business out of it, but I'd bet if they weren't looking for VC-style hockey stick returns, that someone could build a decent business out of it.
• It is always interesting to look at product lifecycles, but most of the time when online products die off, the writing was on the wall long before it happened. This one struck me as a surprise since so many people relied so heavily on it, and it seems really abrupt and likely to upset the basic workflow of so many -- especially in the journalism and academic fields. I can respect the reasons for killing off a "non-essential" product, but it feels like Google seriously underestimated the level to which people had built Google reader into their daily lives.

It wouldn't surprise me, given how loud the backlash is, if Google extends the deadline for shutting down Reader, or if it eventually tries to work out some sort of alternative resolution. We saw the same thing, to a lesser extent, back when AskJeeves tried to shut down Bloglines (the Google Reader of its day before Google Reader existed). And, eventually, Ask sold it off to another company who apparently has kept it running (though, who knows how many users it has today). I think that experience actually pushed a bunch of Bloglines users to jump to Google on the assumption that Google Reader was safe. You would think that someone within Google would remember how that whole thing played out. It's surprising that they don't appear to have learned anything from it.

Last year, we wrote about how a bunch of the largest textbook publishing firms had teamed up to sue an innovative open textbook startup called Boundless for copyright infringement. Was Boundless reproducing their books? Nope. Instead it had created alternative textbooks from various open sources -- but those texts mirrored the basic structure of other textbooks. It was this copying of "selection, structure, organization and depth of coverage... right down to duplicating Plaintiff's pagination" that the textbook publishers went after. Not the content. Yes, they're pissed off that Boundless cleverly sought to compete in the marketplace by making sure its textbooks were good competitors and easier to substitute in -- but without copying any of the actual content.

It's been nearly a year, but Boundless has filed its counterclaims, denying the various charges, and insisting that its works have never infringed, that the textbook publishers are claiming copyright over "non-copyrightable material" and that even if there were infringement, they are protected by fair use. They also claim that the lawsuit is a form of copyright misuse and shows the publishers' "abuse of the copyright monopoly." Should make for an interesting case.

At the same time, Boundless is also seeking a declaratory judgment on its new offerings. Apparently, the company changed its offerings substantially over the last year, and while the case is still over what those earlier offerings looked like (which Boundless believes did not infringe), it's seeking a clear statement that its newer offerings won't get the company sued as well. Boundless' lawyer sent the publishers a letter last month, asking them to make it clear that the lawsuit was just over the older versions and that there were no issues with the new version, but the publishers have refused, saying that the results of the trial "will inform... current and future business practices." In other words, let's see what happens with this case, and then we'll decide if we can sue over more stuff.

We recently had a lively discussion in the comments on a recent post about the upcoming Supreme Court ruling in the Kirtsaeng case, which is somewhat relevant. The Kirstaeng case, of course, involves first sale rights, and whether or not you'll be able to resell what you bought legally abroad. A defender of taking away first sale rights (i.e., upholding the lower court ruling) argued that if the Supreme Court allows the first sale doctrine to apply to textbooks bought abroad, it will mean that textbook providers will jack up their prices abroad, rather than offer them cheaply, and thus poor students in third world countries will never be able to afford an education.

As we pointed out, this is hogwash and ignores that markets are dynamic. If the big expensive publishers decide to drop out of such markets, it seems pretty clear that there will be others who will quickly step in -- and innovative companies like Boundless were exactly what we were thinking about. They're not infringing on the works of the big publishers. They're providing much-needed competition against an oligopoly that has worked hard at keeping prices ridiculously high for educational resources. It's a market ripe for disruption, and it's silly (though not unexpected) that publishers are seeking to abuse copyright law to stamp out that disruption, rather than learning to innovate themselves.

The good folks over at the EFF have posted a letter from a group of startups and innovators to Congress seeking reform of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), which has been abused for years, most notably and recently, in the case against Aaron Swartz (full disclosure: I helped review the initial letter and helped the EFF get some of the signatures on the letter). This is important, because, as we have noted, plenty of innovators and entrepreneurs could have been charged under this law for some of their random hacking experiments, some of which directly led them to create amazing innovations.

Many people have thought that the tech industry isn't as interested in CFAA reform, since it supposedly protects them in cases where they have been hacked, but that's not the case. Through out the startup community, I've heard many people who were horrified to learn about the charges against Aaron Swartz, as they quickly realized how easy it would be for a Justice Department official to spin what they themselves were doing into something nefarious sounding. That does not help innovation.

No one is in favor of having no rules at all, but clearly the CFAA is outdated, broken and widely abused. Fixing the law to focus on actual malicious and nefarious attacks would be a huge step forward, not just for the public, but for innovators and entrepreneurs who often build great things by starting with a simple hack.

One of the things that we've found odd about the decade and a half history of the legacy entertainment industry seeking (often successfully) to shut down a variety of new platforms, is that if you actually looked at the artists who didn't completely freak out at these new services and who recognized what the new services were (better platforms for distribution and promotion, rather than the end of all civilization and culture as we know it), you quickly find that, if done right, the platforms could be used to those artists' advantage. We saw artists use the original Napster to their advantage, only to see it shut down. Ditto for MP3.com, Grokster, Kazaa, Limewire, Megaupload and more. Plenty of artists have discussed how incredibly useful The Pirate Bay has been as a platform for distribution and promotion.

Now, admittedly, many of these companies and services were shut down for some form of copyright infringement or inducement to infringement. So, you can argue that they were illegal. But if we went back even further, we saw the same complaints against many other platforms including the radio, cable TV, the VCR, the DVR, the MP3 player and online video services like YouTube. And yet, every one of those has survived, and they have turned out to be very important parts of the market. In fact, you can look and see how each of those helped expand and grow markets, even as they were decried as being tools of infringement when they first came on the scene.

This is why I'm so fascinated by the artists who are the early adopters -- who jump onto these platforms in the early days and show how they can be used to the artist's own advantage. Because it's through those people that we learn how these platforms, be they tools of infringement or not, can quite possibly help artists much more than hurt them -- if those artists learn to use the tools correctly.

All of that is prelude to this case study, concerning a band called Quiet Company that teamed up to take part in Grooveshark's new Artist Development project, in which Grooveshark would see if it could help "break a band" via the internet. Grooveshark, of course, is a company that is currently being sued by a large chunk of the recording industry for its music player. In talking to various artists about it-- even those who often are more willing to experiment with new platforms -- I've seen many artists really dislike Grooveshark. But, clearly, it has built up a giant, loyal and engaged user-base. And, as always, it seems that, if done right, artists could embrace that to a positive effect, which is appears to be what happened with Quiet Company. First up, if you'd like to hear some of their music, you can click the widget below: I spoke to Quiet Company's manager, who told me that the band was being courted by various record labels, but they quickly realized that they were getting offered deals that weren't the most "artist friendly," and that they had no desire to work with a record label unless they knew that the band was the one with the leverage. So, when Grooveshark approached them, noting that Quiet Company seemed to be doing quite well on Grooveshark, and that they wanted to try to help "break" the band online, the band thought it was a great idea. In terms of what Grooveshark did for the band, it included promoting the band more heavily within Grooveshark and in other places, promoting YouTube videos (more on that below), promoting tours with "tour skins" in locations where the band was heading, highlighting releases, doing promos, contests and the like. They also did some more traditional promotions work, including pushing college radio and festivals, while also finding brand sponsors.

There are a number of interesting tidbits in the case study looking at an entire year or so in which Grooveshark worked to help Quiet Company. One thing that's important to note, of course, is that the band didn't just rely on Grooveshark, but worked to use Grooveshark in combination with other platforms to get attention. Grooveshark seemed to drive steady growth in part by using its own tools to help drive growth elsewhere, such as YouTube. Take a look, for example, at the following timeline: You can see that there's a massive spike coming when YouTube engagement ads ran. Those ads are something that Grooveshark launched last year, to help promote artists, and it looks like that clearly had a pretty big impact. The "ads" ask Grooveshark users to view a portion of a music video to get to use the rest of the site ad free for a period of time, and that massively increased the YouTube views for the band. The timing did also coincide with last year's SXSW Music, where the band played (and got significant press attention -- Time, NPR Music, Billboard -- which certainly helped), but the band says that Grooveshark was instrumental in getting the necessary exposure.

Furthermore, a closer look at Grooveshark promotions, shows that they also impacted things like visits to the website and Facebook likes. But, perhaps more importantly, the end result of this experiment was that the band started making more money with a much broader, international fanbase. The band had a popular following, locally in Texas, where it was from, but had much less support as they got further from home. On Facebook and YouTube, the "top cities" were all in Texas. However, that changed drastically, leading to the ability to tour more widely. After the partnership, rather than just cities in Texas, they had big followings (via Facebook) in Bogota, Sao Paulo and Barcelona, among many other places. The top countries for followers if you looked at YouTube and Facebook included not just the US, but the UK, Canada, Germany, Brazil and Spain. The band is getting ready to perform outside the US for the first time. And, not surprisingly, with a broader fan base, their touring revenue shot up as well. All in all, it's an interesting case study of a band that had a loyal local following, but hadn't "broken." Then it embraced a platform like Grooveshark and to see if it helped or hurt the band. It certainly seems like the band is in a much better position after working with Grooveshark than before. Even if you make the case that their success had nothing to do with Grooveshark, but was due to other factors, it certainly doesn't look like working with Grooveshark harmed the band, as some would imply.

In talking to the band's manager, he repeatedly pointed out that the exposure from Grooveshark made all the difference in the world, and took the band from having a loyal and devoted local following to a band that really had a big following in many places around the globe. He pointed out that the key, in his mind, was that this was a promotional platform, with the focus being on building up a fanbase who loved the music, and to then tour to make money to support that. When asked if there were any "lessons learned" or regrets, the one thing he noted is that they should have been better prepared to go out on tour as soon as things started to break. He felt that they could have done a bit more if they were ready to tour more widely earlier last year.

Something else really interesting came out of the case study and the discussion: after all of this, Quiet Company actually got a private investment from a group of fans to continue what they're doing. That is, rather than signing with a record label, a huge fan actually approached the band and asked them about investing in them, and set up a deal (with a few other fans) that is better than a record deal in that it's very artist friendly. Quiet Company's manager told me that this fan has been a big supporter of the band for a long time -- often buying a bunch of tickets to their shows and just giving them out to a bunch of her friends, and they were pleasantly surprised when that turned into her investing directly in the band.

Separately, he notes that the band believes strongly that this kind of thing was a result of the band really working hard to connect closely with their fans, and that with this greater exposure, it lets them try to do that on a larger scale.

This isn't, of course, to say that every artist should automatically jump on board with Grooveshark. It's just yet another case study in a growing list that shows that where artists carefully and smartly construct a broad strategy that leverages various tools to help promote and distribute their works, combined with connecting with the fans, they can have really compelling success stories. Even as some decry those platforms for claimed copyright infringement, it seems like these platforms can be helpful in doing the most important thing: building a fanbase. And, from there, the band needs to work to connect with that fanbase, and give them ways to support the band. It would be great if, rather than attacking such platforms over and over again, we spent more time like this, looking at ways that artists can use various platforms to their own advantage to succeed.

In a conversation with some folks in the tech industry recently, someone pointed out that nearly every super famous entrepreneur likely could have, at some point, been legitimately accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which is the law that prosecutors used against Aaron Swartz, and is in desperate need of an overhaul. Over at the EFF, Trevor Timm has a great post exploring how Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all might have faced charges under the CFAA. You should read the whole thing, but here are a few snippets:

On Zuckerberg:

In 2006, while a sophomore at Harvard, Zuckerberg created a website called “Facemash” which compared photographs of Harvard’s entire population, asking users to compare two photos and vote on who looked better. Zuckerberg allegedly got access to these photos by “hacking” into each of Harvard’s nine House websites and then collecting them all on one site. It’s not clear what this “hacking” was, but since the charges against him included “breaching security,” it may have fun afoul of the law.

On Jobs:

Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu notes in the New Yorker that Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, did acts that were “more economically damaging than, Swartz’s.” The two college roommates made what were called “blue boxes,” cheap devices that mimicked a certain frequency that allowed them to trick AT&T’s telephone system into making free long-distance calls. They also sold blue boxes before moving onto bigger and better ideas.

On Gates:

In his autobiography, Allen told the story of when the two future billionaires “got hold of” an administrator password at the company they worked at before starting Microsoft. The company had timeshared computers and Allen and Gates were getting charged for using them for their personal work.

The two men used the password to access the company's accounts and set about trying to find a free runtime account so that they could carry on programming without having to pay for the time. They also copied the account database for later perusal. However, management got wise to the plan.

"We hoped we'd get let off with a slap on the wrist, considering we hadn't done anything yet. But then the stern man said it could be 'criminal' to manipulate a commercial account. Bill and I were almost quivering."

Of course, defenders of the existing law will argue that these episodes are entirely unrelated to the later greatness that all three of these folks were eventually involved in. But that's not actually supported by the facts. Facesmash almost certainly directly led Zuckerberg to Facebook. And, in the case of Steve Jobs, he specifically told an interviewer:

“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas…And if we hadn’t have made blue boxes, there would’ve been no Apple.”

Innovators innovate because they hack away at stuff. They push boundaries and they try new things to explore uncharted worlds. Do we really want to be punishing people like that with threats of 35 years in jail? (And, yes, the government absolutely did threaten him with 35 years.)

So folks seemed to enjoy last week's crowdfunding picks post, and the Saturday morning time slot seemed to work, so we'll stick with it. Still not sure on a name, but someone suggested "awesome stuff," and it's hard to argue with that. I reserve the right to change it at some point, but at least this week, we're going with Awesome Stuff. And, this week we're also going to test out a "theme." These are three crowdfunding projects that all revolve around reinventing the mouse. It's been almost 45 years since the humble computer mouse was first demonstrated by Doug Engelbart, in a presentation that I rewatch every so often. It's quite incredible when you realize just how much of the future he's showing off. The clip below should start right at the point where he discusses the mouse (if not, it's right around 30 minutes, 45 seconds): The humble mouse really hasn't changed that much in all those years, though we're starting to see the rise of so-called "smart mouses" (sometimes they don't seem so smart). Here are three crowdfunding projects that struck me as interesting, in that they really attempt to update the mouse in unique ways.

• First up, we have the EGO! smartmouse, which does a whole variety of things to try to take the concept of a computer mouse further. Beyond regular mousing, and being able to work in 3 dimensions, rather than just 2 (yes, you can lift it up and gesture with it in the air), it also can easily authenticate and switch to different computers on the fly, even bringing files along with it. On top of that it can act as a remote control or a gaming controller. Some of these features we've seen elsewhere, but pulling them all together in one device seems pretty impressive.
  
  
• Why does a mouse need to always sit next to your keyboard? What if it was wrapped around your finger? That's the premise behind the Mycestro. As someone who spends a lot of time moving my right hand between the keyboard and the mouse, there's something quite appealing about being able to keep my hands in one position and still be able to use the mouse. You can see the details in the video below. Like the EGO! mouse above, this is also a 3D mouse, recognizing gestures to move the mouse, but it also lets you click and scroll with your thumb. It's difficult to describe without seeing it in action, so check it out.
  
  
• Finally, we have another Kickstarter project that ended yesterday without hitting its goal. I debated if we should still include it, but it definitely seems to fit with the theme. It's the Mauz device that clips onto an iPhone to turn the iPhone itself into a mouse. Like both of the above examples, it enables 3D gestures, but also has a lot of flexibility in terms of features that can be used on the screen. I'm somewhat surprised that it failed to reach its goal. This seems like the kind of Kickstarter project that would take off.
  
  

And there you go. It appears that the mouse is finally the center of some significant innovation. Of course, that might be happening just as all of our screens are becoming touchscreens, and the entire concept of the mouse becomes less relevant.

As some of you know, I'm a big believer in the concepts behind Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, which explain how disruptive innovation almost always takes incumbents by surprise. A few years ago, I even did a two minute video in which I tried to succinctly explain the innovator's dilemma (an explanation later endorsed by Christensen himself). The basic idea, if you're unfamiliar with it, is that disruptive innovations often hit the market by appearing to be "worse" than the legacy product, and thus the incumbents tend to ignore it. They brush it off as being too crappy or too small or too low end or whatever, and they focus on the "high end." What they often fail to take into account are the basic trend lines. The disruptive innovator tends to improve their product at a much faster rate, and, at some point, hits the quality level where, even if it's still worse (or possibly significantly worse) than the incumbents' offerings, it's actually good enough for their needs. When you look at innovative markets through this prism, you can see it happening over and over again.

So, I read, with much interest, a new piece by Larry Downes (a friend, and someone who has posted here on occasion) and Paul Nunes in the Harvard Business Review about Big-Bang Disruption, in which they argue that the old Innovator's Dilemma model may be somewhat obsolete. This is due to a variety of factors, focused around the fact that disruption comes faster than ever before and, these days, frequently comes out of left field -- from someone that people didn't even think was a "competitor." It's a really good read that basically says that a combination of factors, mainly centered around the ability to build new products and services in almost no time and requiring almost no resources, has allowed for a world in which lots of people are rapidly innovating experiment after experiment, and some of those catch on and go viral in an instant -- frequently disrupting existing players, who never even had a chance to see the disruption coming.

It's a great piece that I highly recommend for folks who are interested in the nature of disruptive innovation -- though I'll push back on one point. I really don't see how this conflicts with or is any different than the innovator's dilemma. It just shows the same basic thing happening more quickly. The main argument that Downes and Nunes use to argue that this is different doesn't so much focus on the innovator's dilemma, but rather focuses on how incumbents should respond to disruptive innovation. In the past, it has been argued, that if you understood the dilemma properly, you could spot the disruptive innovator's early, and then move to buy them out or build a viable competitor quickly. In practice, however, we very rarely see that happen. The number of legacy players, who have succeeded in responding to disruptive innovation, remains an astoundingly small list. And I'd argue that part of that is because disruptive innovation always seems to come out of left field and always seems to come much faster than incumbents expect.

That doesn't detract from the main point of the article, however, which does show how these things are happening faster and faster, and a lot of that is because of the ability to just throw something out there for fun, rather than investing millions of dollars early on in an idea that might never even work.

Right now, at Silicon Valley companies large and small, engineers and product developers are getting together late at night in what are popularly known as “hackathons.” Their goal is to see what kind of new products can be cobbled together in a few days. You know, for fun. The innovators are not even trying to disrupt your business. You’re just collateral damage.

Twitter, for example, began its commercial life humbly at the 2007 South by Southwest conference, following its invention at a hackathon the year before. Its developers wanted to test sending standard text messages to multiple users simultaneously, an experiment that required almost no new technology. Today the company boasts more than 200 million active users and half a billion tweets a day. Twitter has destabilized everything from the news and information ecosystem to unpopular national governments.

While I think the article underplays this somewhat, a big part of why these Big-Bang Disruptions can succeed in this way has a lot to do with the fact that not only can ideas hit the market incredibly fast, but they can also fail fast. We're in an environment where so much innovation for new services can not only be built quickly but people can learn and adapt or even shut down just as quickly. One of the biggest reasons why many people believe Silicon Valley remains the home of so many innovative companies is because there's very little stigma associated with failing. In many circles it's a badge of honor. But, in this environment, where it's so easy to create, that means that innovators also get to test a lot of ideas quickly, to throw out the bad ones, and to focus on the winners. This is so much more productive. On top of that, Downes and Nunes point out that each of those failures might not really be "failures" so much as priming the demand pump by teaching the market what's possible.

The adoption of disruptive innovations is no longer defined by crossing a marketing chasm. Instead, the innovators collectively get it wrong, wrong, wrong—and then unbelievably right. That makes it even harder for businesses wed to today’s products and services. All those failed experiments seem like evidence that the emerging technologies just aren’t ready. In reality, in today’s hyperinformed world, each epic failure feeds consumer expectations for the potential of something dramatically better.

The one other bit of insight that I pulled from the article was that this ability to build things quickly and cheaply, but also to do so online, where one can make use of a variety of tools to have a direct relationship with a community, users, customers, etc., means that companies can burst out of the gate with amazing products that aren't just disruptive by being worse than the market leader, but they can actually hit the market while being better than the leader. The authors write about how various strategy experts in the past have suggested that innovators need to focus on a specific value: be cheaper, be more innovative or be more custom (i.e., most customer focused), but that trying to hit on more than one category will dilute the message and the product. However, thanks to a variety of new services and products, it's absolutely possible to hit the market while being cheaper, more innovative and more closely connected to the customer. And that certainly makes it tough to be an incumbent.

In a separate piece, Downes goes further in explaining the policy implications of this argument, focusing on how these "big bangs" suggest that regulators need to tread even more lightly, as new disruptive services can completely change a market in a very short period of time -- in fact, in time frames that many regulators might not even be able to properly comprehend.

Quickly and efficiently, a predictable next wave of technology will likely put a quick and definitive end to any “information empires” that have formed from the last generation of technologies.

Or, at the very least, do so more quickly and more cost-effectively than alternative solutions from regulation. The law, to paraphrase Mark Twain, will still be putting its shoes on while the big bang disruptor has spread halfway around the world.

All in all, a very interesting theory with some important points that are worth thinking about. I look forward to the eventual book on the subject by Downes and Nunes, though I still think that setting it up as somehow a rethinking of the Innovator's Dilemma doesn't quite make sense, as I believe that what they're describing really is just a more detailed explanation of how current tools and technologies have accelerated the innovator's dilemma. It does, potentially, upset the businesses of those who claim they can train incumbents in how to avoid the innovator's dilemma, but I'd argue most of those efforts were never that successful in the first place anyway.

Well, we've certainly heard plenty about DRM and shoehorned-in multiplayer recently, what with EA's recent Hindenburgish SimCity "launch." As was detailed all over the web, the only people hurt by these "features" were paying customers, many of whom spent $50-60 for a server Roulette wheel that limited users to one spin every half hour.

Many developers are concerned with piracy and have made the mistake of crippling their software with DRM that punishes paying users disproportionately while affecting pirates hardly at all. At best, these efforts result in a Pyrrhic tie, damaging the developers' relationships with their customers while having a negligible effect on infringement.

Fortunately, some developers would rather not sacrifice their customers' happiness in order to briefly irritate a few pirates. Avalanche Studios, the developer behind Just Cause 2, is one of these forward-thinking developers. In an interview with Gaming Bolt, founder Cristofer Sundberg had this to say about DRM.

"DRM solutions which limit the game experience should not exist. That's my honest opinion...

They make us look greedy, which we are not. It treats our fans like criminals, which they are not. With that said, I think that we deserve getting paid for years of hard work and I think piracy is hurting our ability to make great games."

However you may feel about his statement on piracy, there's no arguing with the fact that he's unwilling to put anti-piracy efforts ahead of providing Avalanche's customers with a great experience. He also parts ways with EA (among others) on another aspect of piracy prevention, one that's almost always presented as a "feature," rather than just another limitation on the end user.

He is also against adding multiplayer component to a game to prevent the game from being traded.

He uses his own game as an example. Just Cause 2 is rarely sighted in used game stores simply because the players who purchased it years ago are still playing it. There's no (native) multiplayer in Just Cause 2 (excluding an awesome PC-only mod), but that has done nothing to diminish its popularity). As Sundberg sees it, throwing multiplayer options in for their own sake (or as a form of DRM/resale prevention) weakens the original product.

"Nobody wins in the end; the developer can't make the great experience that they want to, the publisher doesn't get its money back and the consumer is disappointed. I am convinced that this mentality contributes to the downfall of the industry."

So, either Sundberg is crazy or he's actually paying attention to the gaming community. At times, it almost seems as though certain companies think their customers are the last people they should listen to -- a very strange position for entities in the business of selling things. Hopefully, more will realize the damage they're doing far outweighs the nominal gains and DRM will become an exception rather than the rule for AAA developers.

Somehow, with little fanfare, last week Rep. Zoe Lofgren (along with Reps. Eshoo, Matsui and Honda) introduced the Global Free Internet Act of 2013, which appears to be a new version of a similar bill from last year. You should read the full bill yourselves, but it points to the importance of a "single, open, global internet," as well as certain things that might threaten that. Among the things it lists are important, are that we, as a country:

(A) encourage utilization on a global basis of technology standards set by international standards-setting organizations, including industry-led and other voluntary bodies, and selected by the market;
(B) respect the security of information, privacy, and speech of Internet users;
(C) promote investment in Internet-related innovation;
(D) refrain from compelling Internet service providers and other intermediaries to restrict the free flow of information on the Internet; and
(E) allow trade in Internet-related goods, services, information, and content.

And it worries about governments seeking to censor or constrain the internet by doing any of the following:

(A) mandating unique technology standards favoring domestic producers as a condition of market access or pursuing related policies regarding standard-setting that are discriminatory and subvert the open, global nature of the Internet;
(B) sponsoring or tolerating the use of Internet-related tools to gain unauthorized access to public-sector and private-sector networks in the United States to disrupt their operation;
(C) blocking, filtering, or otherwise restricting Internet communications in a manner that discriminates against Internet-based services and content originating in other countries;
(D) monitoring Internet use and communications in a manner that restricts individual privacy and freedom; and
(E) imposing market access requirements or liabilities that discriminate against or otherwise impede Internet-related goods, services and content from other countries.

It then goes on to create a task force to take on these issues, and to help the government promote the first list, while avoiding the second. It seems like a perfectly reasonable plan, with little controversial about it, which is why I wouldn't be surprised to see Congress ignore it.