Eat more herring!
Thorstein Veblen was a cranky Norwegian-American economist best known for his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class where he coined the term conspicuous consumption, which meant that if former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski bought a $9000 shower curtain with company money he should probably go to prison… and did. Veblen instantly came to mind this morning when I read about how nine of the top editors were leaving Engadget for a new gig no longer associated with AOL. There’s a lot to think about in this move, which Veblen (who died in Palo Alto in 1929) would have appreciated.
Veblen, you see, was a socialist of sorts but really he was more a dour Norwegian who respected hard work and the accumulation of knowledge, if not wealth. Give a man enough pickled herring, Veblen thought, and what else did he really need?
Veblen was fascinated with what he called engineers, by which he meant the folks whose ideas and expertise made possible technology-based economic output. Veblen had no time for workers or bosses, but he loved engineers, seeing them as the heart of any real enterprise. In this Engadget story those nine editors constitute the engineering class as opposed to workers who are a commodity and bosses who are parasites.
Veblen thought correctly that production workers couldn’t fix the very machines they ran and neither could the bosses, so he saw the real power in an organization lying with the engineers, whether they knew this or not. If the engineers walked out, Veblen theorized, then the enterprise was screwed. But this ignored the importance of capital (provided by the big bosses in exchange for those shower curtains) and didn’t anticipate the global pool of technical talent available today, where almost any geek can be replaced.
There’s a long tradition of techies hitting the road en masse. Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce and the rest of the traitorous eight did just that when they left Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild Semiconductor back in the 1950s. The eight had had enough of Shockley and so took their balls down the road to Fairchild where, ironically, the big boss wasn’t a geek at all but a much more traditional hands-off tycoon.
At Engadget we see the top editorial talent (the word-engineers) leaving because they didn’t like the factory machinery (blogging software that hadn’t been upgraded since 2003) and felt unappreciated and under-rewarded in an organization that I have in the past referred to as a sweat shop. I think it didn’t help, either, that AOL just spent $315 million in cash for the Huffington Post, giving Arianna Huffington — a very smart (and smart-ass) executive who tends to see technologists as a commodity — oversight of Engadget.
Maybe Huffington was intending to clean house at Engadget, but probably not. More likely she made comments about how she and her crew were going to fix things — things that this new traitorous nine may not have seen as broken.
Any time new management asks you to re-apply for your own job it is a sign of zero professional regard.
There’s a wonderful experiment here, in which we’ll shortly see just how valuable are those nine editors and, for that matter, Engadget itself. The Engadget brand stays with AOL, but will the readers? Or does the real value lie with those departing editors?
My guess is that both will fare well. Huffington now has an incentive to throw a little money at Engadget, so that crappy blogging platform will no doubt be improved. The editors taking over will rise to the task and get raises to boot. Yet at the same time the departing editors will create something interesting at their new site, whatever it is called, and readers will love that, too.
The reason why all this happiness will ensue is something Veblen never considered: this is a frictionless information economy where more is nearly always better.
When it comes to information there is no such things as conspicuous consumption and none of us are ever information-rich enough.
If I am right, what does it say about brand value? It says AOL paid too much for the Huffington Post, that building and buying in this market are comparable efforts if you take into account the cost of time, and neither deserves a premium as a result.
The engineers neither win nor lose in this while the big bosses will learn that their factories and shower curtains may not be worth so much after all.
Normally I would dismiss the blogging platform comment as irrelevant but darn if one the main reasons I don’t read endadget is because of the irritating reverse-text-on-rollover on the 50 point font headlines. Just trying to moving my cursor over to the scrollbar so I could see more of the actual article was so annoying that I never even bookmarked the site.
But it’s still better than gawker, so that’s a plus.
In an ideal world the designers at Gawker would be on trial for crimes against humanity for their terrible new UI.
Here, freakin’ here! I never go the those sites any more. I read the rss feeds. And if I do go to the sites I use my Android or iPhone. Cannot stand the new page design!!
At PBS we used Moveable Type, which may have been okay to read I guess, but was painful to use. Now I am on WordPress and vastly happier. So the platform really does matter, as does keeping your tools sharp.
It’s always good to see editors striking out on their own to create something new. News websites are in such flux right now we need as many people as possible experimenting with the best ways to reach readers.
That said, HuffPost is about as good as it gets right now at reporting on the web. AOL made Arianna Huffington really rich because she’d bring along a bunch of really smart engineers who understand metrics and SEO better than most – and far better than anyone at AOL. So the company will benefit immediately from boosts in traffic and efficiency, and hopefully use these gains to hire journalists, expand reporting, etc.
You can’t fault the Engadget editors for wanting to create their own thing, but they may have just walked away from their best chance to get paid well for playing and writing all day. And, if you believe Bob on AOL’s true intent, they may have lost out on the dream job of working for Google one day.
I don’t think they were really in the position to cash in. Look over @ HuffPost and see how little of the content is derived from (paid) editors rather than from other news organizations. There is a debate about how other news organizations scramble to get their news onto the HuffPost, but that is besides the point. Now Huffington will just have to get the tech companies to format their press releases to look like blog posts (let’s be honest about what Engadget actually is), and there. She just saved a bit of cash.
What I want to hear about is whether the pay-wall at the NYTimes is in response to deals like AOL’s for HuffPost. That, and how Gizmodo could approve such a disastrous web-design makeover.
Daily Show “End Times”:
https://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-june-10-2009/end-times
“Why is aged news better than real news?”
— and bosses who are parasites.
Bob, you’re getting increasingly schizoid. Either be a Social Darwinist or a Socialist. This yoyo business is making me dizzy.
And you’re forgetting that HuffPo still has an issue with paid/not-paid writers. That has yet to be worked out. It may well be that some of both kinds will leave. Whether HuffPo will still be worth visiting in six months is a question.
“. . . and bosses who are parasites”
Had you taken the time to read the sentence directly preceding this quote, you would have realized that it begins with the phrase, “Veblen had no time for workers or bosses”, putting the sentence after it in Veblen’s voice, not Cringely’s.
As your doctor, I recommend you take to English reading classes and call me in the morning.
Wrong. It’s Bob.
Previous sentence: “Veblen had no time for workers or bosses”. It sounds like it is your opinion that Bob feels the same way as Veblen.
Google “Veblen” and “parasite”.
Veblen thought bosses were parasites.
“none of us are ever information-rich enough” – you can’t be too rich or to thin, but can you have access to too much information? There is a limit to the amount we can consume and if we constantly look for more it will consume us….
That’s why nature invented sleep!
Fred Hoyle has a dumb person adsorb the alien data easily while the ‘prejudiced’ set-in-stone ‘concepts’ scientist goes mad in ‘A for Andromeda’ SF
Correct me if its the wrong book!
In data and information, the underlying causes are not obvious. Focus on trivials leads nowhere! Fundamentalism in all its form is a ‘locked in syndrome’ that leads nowhere! Leaders have the Greek fates to contend with – The Jason Myth is a metaphor – to find Goals.
“There is a limit to the amount we can consume and if we constantly look for more it will consume us….”
Thresh hold excitation leads to satiation leads to new thresh hold excitation leads to sati……………. I must stop I need a snort! Enough!
Information, infomation… are we really being informed or positively enriched by 95% of what’s peddled as “information”? I like to read the newspaper, watch BBC Newsnight before I go to bed, and read Cringely when I have the chance. Oh, and there’s sleep, cooking and eating and… WORK.
In the time I have left over, I scratch my head and wonder how anyone finds time to play WoW, Call of Duty, blog like mad, read other people’s blogs, twitter, tweet, keep 5000 friends on facebook AND go to the toilet a couple of times a day unless they’re unemployed.
Ideas, anyone?
David clone yourself like mad.
And have meetings with yourselves everyday for info missed things missed things to do and keep cloning!
How long before you rule the world?
Then you can relax you’ll be queen bee.
sorry males are useless in hives!
Hmm… I’d get bored with my own company pretty quickly and, though I love girls, a sex change doesn’t appeal and incest is way beyond the pale (actually, come to think of it, lesbian incest… no, let’s not go there either). And what if I got really pissed off with the situation and told one of my co-workers “go f**k yourself”? It’s all sounding way too complicated. Maybe we’re better off with purposelessly blogging and tweeting all the time.
I’d say their ‘editors’ are not that valuable. I read Engadget every day and couldn’t name a single one of their writers. Having said that I don’t feel particularly attached to Engadget so I could very easily delete it from my RSS and get my tech news from some other gadget blog if it took my fancy.
I don’t really care who writes it as I see sites like Engadget as sweatshops that shovel out lightly altered press releases ASAP as perfect for staying up to date with news within minutes of it happening. I visit other sites for my informed insight (hat tip to the Cringely) that takes a bit longer to be formed.
This is my sentiment as well. I read it daily, mostly via an Android phone because the web interface has a lot of annoying issues. I also don’t know a single editor, or author, and still read it for what it is.
Bob I think you’re overestimating what those editors are bringing to the table. They’re most likely leaving because they suspect their journalistic qualifications (incompetence) are coming into question. Which is really saying something given the nature of Huff&Puff.
It’s essentially a tech news aggregation site, and that doesn’t really take an “engineer” to do. And can we stop “engineer-ing” professions already? They’re editors, that’s all they are, and not really all that good at it given the quality of the articles that appear on that site.
Frankly the writing there is frequently slip-shod and all too often biased.
Where it shines are the comments section, which generally give far better insight than the articles themselves, and in the fact the site generally does a decent job of keeping you abreast of recent developments in tech. But then again, as someone else pointed out, you can get that through product press releases, which all to frequently their articles resemble.
I agree with everything you guys are saying – except for the quality of the comments. Maybe it’s just the articles that I read, but I find the comments to be particularly useless for a tech-related site. Compare that with say Macrumors library of information in the comments. I really don’t see too much of a major advantage of one tech-blog over another until they become more specialized or actually have insightful information. For example, boygeniusreports is pretty solid, and does a much better job of reporting (!) on RIM than others.
dtizzle smell the roses cross the 59th St bridge even Einstein made jokes about God.
We all can’t have 190 IQs invent things every second or say profound things.
This is geek lite site where i sound geekie
Chill out man!
?
It was a fine vintage.
No I agree. I was to generous about the comments. What I really meant to say is that frequently in the comments one can get a clue, or a link that allows you to follow-up for more/better information.
A bit collaterally off thread, but, I’ve often wondered about this in regard to the NFL.
As far as I can tell, the owners provide nothing. Seems to me that if the owner’s were to lock out the players, nothing could/would/should stop the players from ‘scheduling’ ‘pickup’ games and selling tickets to the public to watch, if they felt so inclined.
The one thing that might stop them is poor planning and management by the players association, but setting that aside that the players association is being run my morons, it seems that if they were properly organized, they could just tell the owners that they’ll just play games without them anyway.
In such a predicament, the owners would fold their hand and cave in to almost any demand made by the players.
I don’t think this is possible in most industries. Owners are, in essence, “project managers” who coordinate and bring things together. The more things that need to be brought together, the more important the role of an owner is. In football what do owner’s bring together? Players, refs, coaches, media, and a stadium.
In baseball, ownership organizes a vast farm (minor league) system. That’s pretty complicated business. In football, the NFL lets colleges take care of all that.
Refs? Not hard, my catholic grade school managed to come up with refs for our saturday basketball games. Coaches? Same. Media? Well they need something to talk about. Stadium? Well even popwarner games find a stadium to play in from time to time.
So taking your ball and going down the road is a disruptive possibility, uniquely I’d say, to the NFL.
who owns the broadcast rights to games? even if the players play games without the owners, unless someone watches it (and pays for that), they aren’t getting paid.
Well that’s the thing. Some (the hard core fan) would watch and some would pay to watch. Even if the numbers are quite small, it wouldn’t take much for the players to succeed. Remember, profit is made at the margins. The owners would fold in a fortnight. The players start out at a small scale while they are locked out, just like the original league did, then grow their margin. The first year would be a bust, but the second year would get traction. As time goes by the owners would lose leverage as the players gain traction. It would work like that.
Someone has to rent stadiums, negotiate with networks for payment, arrange schedules, etc. You can call this person(s) agent, mediator or owner but they are still the one critical required position and will still gain the majority financial return.
— will still gain the majority financial return.
Only if the “slaves” let them, which is why there’s a lock-out. The “slaves” have done the arithmetic, and figured out that these parasites are vastly overpaid for what little they bring to the table. Spartacus!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just think, if we had more government control, we could be as happy as the people of the USSR were, or the Chinese and Cubans are now!
Seems to me the players association could do all of that – and should have been preparing to do this “pick up” games in lieu of an actually season in order “to keep their members from losing their skills”.
one word CONTRACTS
Lawyers would become richer!
And as you said an off subject observation!
Muslims don’t follow the contracts they sign if they don’t like them!
Its the LAW sonny!
As soon as I found that AOL was buying Engadget I deleted them from my feeds. I did so because AOL’s pressure for quantity of timely output will result in content becoming more derivative than it was. Compare the most recent five to ten gadget blog headlines among the players. Topic-wise, nearly all these sites are fungible and my goal is to have as few in my feed as possible. I choose the keepers based on quality of writing. For blogs, that comes down to writers making their own decisions without a “suited one” pulling the strings. For more established media it involves good editors in concert with writers.
Could AOL have “bought” these people? Certainly. And maybe they thought they had done so. But as AOL began “managing” the writers, the value vanished for all parties concerned.
landing site: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/business/media/04carr.html?_r=1&bl
The AOL pitch looked so much like the ones I always saw at the Blue Pig for the customer facing lower life forms called sales, systems engineering, services and administration. Looks like AOL wants to make a creative profession, writing and blogging, into a measurable process so it can drive hundreds of slave writers into a surreal hell on earth with no means of escape from a financial tyranny controlled by Ariana Huffington in the same manner Sammie Palmisano hired soft spoken nice, ethical guys like Bob Moffat to enforce his progroms.
One thing I like about this site is the freedom not to be a member of the club or other clubs. Groucho Marx’s comment is apropos here!
The first I learned of the mass walkout was when I complained to one of the editors about the need for knowing who you are at Engadget.
The hoops you need to jump through to to make an comment!
Who cares if some cuss or blue words are said – someone can remove or #@&#$ them. What is important is the large variety of free unencumbered views. The more the merrier. Who cares if your view are highbrow or lowbrow – its your view. And comment space is cheap!
I have complained to the editors of Slate about the Technology guy — who is ignorant pedantic and chauvinistic — because I need to own my views.
My views are free in the Comment section unlike the authors blog when I get paid for my words then I want the checks to find me!
They get hints for future blogs for free anyway.
If this continues it will be monotony of similar views and editors will leave because its gone even to their level!
Oh that is the problem?
Gadget porn sites, and even serious engineering sites, are pretty much all press release driven now. Given that Huffington seems to have taken a leaf out of the Rupert Murdoch playbook (controversy and fashion trumps truth), I don’t see that as a positive step forward in editorial oversight at the very least… less so given that Engadget was already fairly vapid.
Well, to misquote Philip K Dick the next great products ideas will be involved with Understanding It For You Wholesale… right now I have to manually trawl all of the above mention sites to glean the occasional tidbit and file it away for future reference. Finding and integrating all of that raw data is the hard bit.
This is exactly the type of thing that drives real new job creation in America, in fact everywhere – disgruntled young men and women, setting out as a group, on one leader setting out first and pied pipering the rest after him, to start a new business. Almost all job creation comes from new businesses. Established businesses remain productive by cutting staff and offshoring. New business hire, hire, hire.
So here’s to you, the intrepid ones, as they say in show biz: “break a leg”.
Gadget porn sites, and even serious engineering sites, are pretty much all press release driven now.
What he said. I wonder how Techmeme would exist without all the slashcrunchmodoadget copy-cats. Easier to subscribe to pr-newswire, and cut out the middleman.
When I was the Direct Marketing Manager at a successful software company which created an marketed the #1 Personal Information Manager, AOL wanted us to BUY a KEYWORD in AOL. I asked them why I needed to pay for that “privilege”? Their reply showed me that they did not understand the dynamics of their own user base’s use dynamic.
When AOL bought Times Warner, I saw the same thing — that they did not understand who their users are and what they would become.
When AOL bought Huffingpost, I saw more of the same thing.
By the way, there was an dictionary-like book about Compuserve from that time in which my name appears as an entry – MY 15 minutes of fame.
Hey Bob, how does this comment relate to the TI/National merger? There are going to be a lot of Analog engineers in the market for a new job.
> coined the term conspicuous consumption, which meant
That you spent pointlessly to show that your wang, er, wallet, was bigger than your neighbour’s.
Nothing to do with company money.
norway rules
Bob, are you sure the engadget guys didn’t actually plan this long ago when engadget got bought by AOL and had to wait out a period to get certain bonuses etc?
It goes to the fact that on-line media has, and still is, leveling the playing field. Before anyone pays hundreds of millions, for an asset like they they had better have a good grasp on the whole picture.
Good luck with that.
[…] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Geeks like me: What’s Engadget really worth? – buy editors not the brands that they work for […]
John, idea for your web page formatting. I just clipped this article into evernote and it comes in with this title:
I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Geeks like me: What’s Engadget really worth? – Cringely on technology
Which I changed to:
Cringely 2011 Geeks like me: What’s Engadget really worth?
a pseudo academic cite format that I use for my evernote notebook on articles. Your current format helps you figure out where a page came from. But, what about using a web page title that pre-processes the information for readers? An alternative. Not advocating here, just thinking out loud.
Best Regards!
bill meade
Bob, are you sure the engadget guys didn’t actually plan this long ago when engadget got bought by AOL and had to wait out a period to get certain bonuses etc?
Just trying to moving my cursor over to the scrollbar so I could see more of the actual article was so annoying that I never even bookmarked the site.
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