Ok this is hitting pretty close to home as I know people who have or had worked at either Sun or Oracle. I didn't slave away few years in Sunnyvale for nothing. What do I think about the Sunacle|OrcSun acquisition?A few years ago the picture looked like this:
Oracle's business viability = [world's greatest sales/marketing] + [mediocre and bad engineering]
Sun's business viability =[really really bad sales/marketing] + [amazing R&D and engineering]
To put it another way, Oracle survives by selling ice-cubes to Eskimos, and Sun survives by making great ice-cubes and trying to sell them in Alaska. You with me so far? So the acquisition means the following:
Oracle + Sun = [world's greatest sales/marketing] + [mediocre and bad engineering] + [amazing R&D and engineering] + [really really bad sales/marketing]
I'm sure the performance metrics driven Automaton (AKA Larry Ellison) will see this in no time, and knowing him, he will drive up his metrics by doing the followings:
Oracle + Sun-[mediocre and bad engineering] - [really really bad sales/marketing] =[world's greatest sales/marketing] + [amazing R&D and engineering]
Now there's a recipe for greater success! Just fire Oracle engineers (esp. the apps/CRM/ERP group that live on 400/600 Oracle Pkwy, Redwood Shores) and fire Sun sales/marketing team. Stock holders rejoice!
Back in the early days of internet when Yahoo ruled the day, companies were trying to figure out different ways to monetize. Many different online ads and models came out waaaaay before Google and AdWords/AdSense became as prevalent as it is today. Ah, the good 'ol mid 1990s, or more precisely, the annoying Netscape+Java Applet+pop-up+spammy ads days. Do you remember seeing those ads with scantily dressed women + spy-cam (X11 ads) and those moving "Punch the Monkey And Win!!!" advertisements? Those were the good 'ol days. Or, I guess looking back, those were simply... the days. Actually, those were probably the dark ages of the internet.
"Punch the Monkey and Win" ads by Advertising.com were basically wide banner ads that you find on top of common search engines (Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, Inktomi... hey do you even know what Inktomi was?). It even showed up on content providers like CNN, etc. The implementation of Punch the Monkey went through countless revisions (it could have been motion GIF or Java Applet and later Flash), but the idea was simple: on the ad, show a monkey that moves back and forth, and you use your mouse to click where the monkey is. When you "punch" the monkey at the right time, the ad brings you to another screen that says something like "CONGRATULATIONS YOU WON! Fill out this form to get free coupons and great deals and super discounts at a store of your choice near you!!!" Ok, I don't know why people out there actually fill out these spammy forms, but in the wonderful world of advertising, amazing innovations happen because of an abundance of idiots filling out these spammy forms.
This is just a sample to show you how annoying it is. It is not a real ad.
Ok fine, so Punch the Monkey is a sleazy ad, BUT IT WORKED and made lots and lots of money! It was so prevalent in those days, it was hard to not see a monkey ad during the day. Advertising.com did a lot of analysis on click-through-rates (CTR). Any sort of color or motion or sound caused more people to click, and that was good news for advertising companies that wanted to spam or just collect lead-gen. In fact, it worked so well, that after a while everyone knew what it was all about, and in time people stopped punching the monkey and that was uber bad news for Advertising.com. What did they do in response? They made the monkey ad MORE colorful. That increased CTR, and they were happy for a while...but then... people stopped clicking again. So then they made the monkey move FASTER, and CTR increased... but eventually... CTR went down again! So then they made the monkey more obnoxious by adding multiple monkeys, uglier monkeys, monkeys that popped out of your browser, so on so forth. This kept going and going for about a year and every time Advertising.com did something different, CTR went up a little. As you can imagine, the ads got very obnoxious, especially the unwanted pop-ups (Javascript became more prevalent). Eventually, people got really tired of the monkey and just said "F*** I HATE THIS MONKEY" and simply went to other sites that didn't have the monkey ad.
Moral of the story? You can run your business on... pure business, and you can try to squeeze money from people, but if you provide something of no value to people (adding Punch the Monkey ad to something of value), it devaluates the product, the user experience, and turns people off. In the end, the product DOES matter regardless of how much monkey you make. People will eventually get turned off by your product and never come back again. I guess this is one of the countless reasons why I'm usually turned off by work that deals with advertising, and how people prioritize short term business gains over value and user experience. By the way, Advertising.com was bought by AOL, so I guess the executives were happy about their exit. Now, WHY would AOL buy something like that is beyond me, but I guess AOL isn't so different from Advertising.com where they are first and foremost, business driven (vs. Apple that is very much "quality experience" driven). I'm sure Steve Jobs would not have said anything kind about AOL and Advertising.com.
I was having a conversation with my friend Michael H about dreams, and somehow we started talking about monetizing dreams-- write your daily dreams on the web and then monetize it. However, dreams don't usually make much sense (to me at least). They're usually trashy, useless information. Can you actually monetize things that don't make sense? In another word, is it better to post trash on the internet than to post nothing at all? Let's see now... In the DemandMedia world, the answer is, YES. According to Rosenblatt, it's better to post something, anything, than nothing at all.
DemandMedia pays starving English majors, errrr I mean... aspiring writers a whopping minimum wage (and in many cases below minimum wage) for writing articles ranging from how-tos, to product reviews, to rants about Britney Spears, and other countless things you can think of. Apparently there are tons and tons of writers in America who prefer to get paid peanuts to write, instead of getting paid waaay more money flipping burgers at McDs. Let's go over this now: Writing+passion=10 peanuts. Flipping burger+no passion=10000000 peanuts. The monetary reward is clear, yet passionate writers prefer to get measly 10 peanuts to write, than to make it rich by flipping burgers. So where do all these writing monkeys come from? I don't know. Apparently, there are a bunch of them out there.
Ok fine, maybe monetary motivation is not what motivates writers. As Michael pointed out to me, "there's a fundamental human desire to communicate and that includes writing." People will write, and people will read, regardless of monetary compensations. Furthermore, Michael pointed out that aspiring writers can both flip burgers to survive AND write for DemandMedia. And for these starving English majors, writing is a "gateway" to famedom (this is not a real word, is it?) or getting a Pulitzer Prize. As long as that 0.00000000001% chance of making it exists, these writers will be motivated to write. I guess it's kind of like how lottery and cult work too. You can really motivate (or trick) people by giving them a remote possibility of super-duper-awesomeness happening... similar to how Egyptian workers spend their entire lives building a pyramid so they can go to heaven, or how extremists blow themselves up so they can meet 99 virgins, or how people do good will so they will go to heaven, or how starving writers dump trash on internet so they can be famous one day. Apparently, DemandMedia's Rosenblatt doesn't think his company is dumping trash or exploiting people, so it must be true. It's on the internet. It must be true.
One thing that always baffled me is that DemandMedia generates gets very high ranked and well read articles for some odd reason-- meaning people actually read trash on the internet. But no way! People can't possibly desire trash by spend time on the internet doing unproductive things. I thought that's what tabloid magazines and TMZ are for. Wasting time on the amazingly useful internet??!? It's just inconceivable! The day that pigs fly!!! So anyways, in the DemandMedia world, any content is worth something. Heck, the company is very profitable today, and expanding quickly. As for monetizing dreams, I bet they are worth something too, because posting anything is better than posting nothing. Who knows, maybe I can apply to DemandMedia as a writer if one day, I decide that writing is my true passion/life aspiration (ahem, *cough*, shyeah right... I hate writing). Or... maybe I can just put my content on my blog and monetize it myself. Wait, I'm already doing that. Screw DemandMedia. I guess in the end, the economy of flooding the internet with tons of disposable content written by starving writers, is actually working extremely well. I guess this proves that people really spend time doing unproductive things on the internet after all. Pigs do fly after all!
The recurring theme for both of these blogs are as follows: Employment aka "trading time for money". Low risk, hard work, has a well defined upper limit to earnings. Work you put in may not represent what you get back (e.g. if you're a corporate climber with a knack for politics, this is definitely for you). Consulting aka "trading skills/jobs done for money". Medium risk, but you get to build a network for Productizing (see below). Also, what you put in is usually what you get out. Productizing aka "trading time and skill for a product." High risk. Competition, market saturation, you really need to know what you're doing and be a hard core entrepreneur to make it out. There is no upper limit to your earnings. Management aka "doing all of the above using someone else's time."
IMHO, you can't really climb from a lower number to a higher number (employment to productizing) in a short time. There needs to be a bootstraping process. You need capital and time to do 2 or 3 or 4, so you may need to start with 1. You definitely need to build a network (e.g. via consulting) because that is quite beneficial before you plunge ahead and build a product.
The jist I'm getting is basically-- employment offers you pay, but take it only if you really need it and can tolerate it for decades because if you go that route, you'll be stuck with it all your life.
