First draft of the future? Yes, throw it away!
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:date: 2015-10-06T08:14:29
:status: draft
:category: computer
:tags: econtalk, future, freeMarket


Yet another great `EconTalk show`_ with Tim O’Reilly. There was
a couple of things which made me wonder. First of all, of course,
Tim O’Reilly is Tim O’Reilly. Always, brilliant, surprising,
and with the wisdom which is somehow like a pithy Oracle. He is
too often right, but it is hard to know in advance what he means.

One thing which made me happy was Tim’s unabashed optimism for
the real market. By the real market I mean

    In my consulting days, I'd been around a lot of startups. And
    I watched them go from being really interesting companies to
    becoming just like everybody else. And I thought, 'I don't
    want to do that.' So, I resolved I didn't want to take
    anybody's money. But I also knew that the web was growing so
    fast that if I didn't take other people's money, we'd be out
    of luck. So, we sold [our website] to AOL [America Online],
    who promptly screwed it up. We did very well out of the
    transaction, but we went on from there. And built our
    publishing business through the 1990s.

and also

    There is a wonderful rigor in free-market economics; When you
    have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other
    people to pay for them, it clears up an awful lot of wooly
    thinking.

which all leads to

    My partner at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Bryce Roberts, has
    started this project called Indie.vc where he's really trying
    to find companies that need the guidance of a VC (Venture
    Capital), because a VC can really bring a lot to the table
    besides money, but who fundamentally have a business model
    that involves selling things to customers as opposed to, 'Our
    business model is to get funded and eventually we'll get
    enough users and then we'll get acquired by somebody who has
    a business model.' And there are a lot of companies like
    that. And we don't celebrate them enough. And we don't value
    them enough. We are so caught up in this model that you are
    going to grow to massive scale, and then it will be funded by
    enterprise or more likely it will get acquired; maybe it will
    get acquired and shut down.

So, yes, I stand by my statement that `Facebook is a dud`_. I
just have to warn you, the Cepls’ family has a long tradition
of having the right predictions with a timing a little bit off.
My father predicted correctly in 1968 that the Soviet Union will
fall under the defects of its system and described the mechanism
quite exactly. He was right, just his timing was a little bit
off, so he wasted next twenty years of his life, the best years
of life most likely, in the Communist Czechoslovakia. So, yes,
that timing is often a problem.

But I still stand by this statement, meaning that the company
which does not produce anything which its users were willing to
pay for is doomed. It might be an entertainment company, but in
fact Facebook doesn’t provide even good entertainment. I would
certainly prefer to watch “Murdoch Mystery” or “Downton
Abbey” to watching my Facebook feed. It may be the
communication platform, but it does it rather poorly as well. So,
yes, people believe that they somehow communicate their feelings
to the world by writing two line sentences, without understanding
that for the thought to be valuable it has to be worked on as
well as on any other product. And I believe that people will find
sooner or later that HMM, WORK ON IT.

.. _`EconTalk show`:
    http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/10/tim_oreilly_on.html
.. _`Facebook is a dud`:
    {filename}i-will-say-just-one-very-crazy-thing.rst