DMGTrust and Money
Just a couple of really interesting blog posts I want to point to before heading out for the weekend.
First, Seth Godin has a cool post up about monetizing trust. I see echos of Godin's thinking in Rick Rubin's plans for the music industry:
At Rubin's suggestion, he has also set up a "word of mouth" department, which will probably employ some members of the Big Red focus group along with dozens of other 20-somethings. The "word of mouth" department will function as a publicity-promotional arm of the company, spreading commissioned buzz through chat rooms across the planet and through old-fashioned human interaction. "They tell all their friends about a band," Barnett explained. "Their job is to create interest."
Rubin almost gets it, but he's still trying to bolster the price of the music itself, even as the price of audio tracks is inexorably pressured downward. He doesn't yet see that discoverabiliy and quality of recommendations will be the only scarce resources left in that equasion, and he'll have to either boost unit sales (while accepting lower prices) or use the music itself as a loss leader, which may or may not be workable.
Second, Bruce Eckel is pondering bottlenecks in software development, arguing that it can't be money or brains, because Microsoft seems to have an effectively infinite supply of both, and still couldn't get Vista out on time or with its planned feature set.
Me, I think it's complexity. Once a system gets big enough, you hit the vertical asymptote where inter-module communication becomes such a drag on the running software, and such a prolific source of bugs, that you only have two choices: never release the software, or back your way down the complexity slope by cutting features. Adding more developers doesn't help, because developers have to coordinate their activity. And hiring better developers may get you farther up the slope, but my bet is that Microsoft already has a lot of the smartest developers out there.
That said, I know nothing, not diddly-fleep, about large software development projects. I have read The Mythical Man-Month, but have no organic expertise to speak of. It'll be interesting to follow the comments on Eckel's blog.