“Qwikster,” Meet the Mailster.
In a refreshingly humble-- almost supplicant-- blog post, Netflix has finally explained the logic behind their unpopular and seemingly unsuccessful rate switch this July:
...we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.
We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.
...At first blush, the logic of splitting DVD delivery from streaming makes sense to me: licensing for streaming and DVD rentals are two different beasts. I think they may have made this decision looking forward toward their recent parting of ways with Starz.
Even if it's not the right decision, it will take a little while to shake out. But I can tell you, with twitter still reeling about Netflix's announcement, one thing they definitely got wrong: the Qwikster branding.
The name is silly. I personally find the spelling painful. I doubt I'm alone in either of these opinions. But there's also a really powerful historical echo to the name, that dates back to the 1950s. And it's not a good association.
Let's say you're trying to think of a brand name that evokes the speed and efficiency of your service-by-mail. Is this the first thing you want (some) people to think of?
The Mailster -- courtesy National Postal Museum
Qwikster, meet the Mailster.
Netflix, please note, the Mailster was one of the biggest flops of American postal engineering. It had trouble going up hills. Mail carriers complained of them filling with smoke. It couldn't operate in three inches of snow. Some reported it could be knocked over by a large dog. And they had a high rate of injury. But the Post Office Department continued to produce more and more for over a decade, seemingly driven by a sunk cost fallacy.
The Mailster, simply put, was a bad idea, and a giant lemon.
Now, I've spent the last year of my life researching postal engineering. I've met USPS engineers-- they're a talented, intelligent bunch. And I have a lot of affection for the goofy little Mailster. It's a great reminder that engineering successes are built on trial and error, that we learn what works by seeing what does not. And more likely than not, most of the people who will see "Qwikster" and think "Mailster" are big old Postal geeks like me, and not the general population.
But the fact that the names are so similar doesn't bode well. Branding 101 tells you to avoid names that are going to evoke pricey, colossal mistakes of the past. Netflix is already skating on thin ice, PR-wise-- which is why their blog post has the apologetic tone it does.
Beyond the question of whether consumers really will respond positively to having two URLs and potentially two bills for what was once one service, this echo across time of the two names points-- in my opinion-- to a major business decision being made somewhat hastily, and unveiled while still half-baked. And that makes me worry for Netflix's future.
ETA:
The twitter account for "Qwikster" likewise suggests insufficient vetting by PR. SRSLY.
Eric Schmidt and the Submerged State Problem
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, recently decided to explain to the British public exactly what was wrong with their computer industry-- their education system. A quote from Schmidt's talk, posted on GigaOm, really grabbed my attention as a historian of media and technology:
“The UK is the home of so many media inventions,” he said. “It’s interesting that you invented photography, you invented television, you invented computers in both concept and in practice — it’s not widely known, but the world’s first office computer was built in 1951 by Lyon’s chain of tea shops. Interesting. Yet nobody, none of the world’s leading players in these fields are from the UK. That’s a problem.”
Now while I'm sure that the British public was pleased as punch to have Schmidt come over and lecture them on their nation's historical achievements and its subsequent inability to live up to those achievements, I wonder if anyone in the audience immediately noticed what a tin ear for history Schmidt seems to have.
The British definitely do deserve a lot of credit in the early history of computing. And Tim Berners-Lee, a product of British schools somewhat later, has had a little bit of influence himself. The fact is, though, that-- as Schmidt was arguing-- the British influence on the computer market isn't what one might have expected it to be in the 1950s. But for Schmidt to pointedly lay that on the feet of British teachers is historically inaccurate, to put it mildly.
Schmidt is letting an ideologically-driven mythos of the history of computers drive his interpretation of history at the expense of very basic facts.
Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as a meritocracy. Every company starts with scrappy, nerdy college kids in a garage somewhere, college dropouts become multibillionaires, and the internet is a place where information wants to be free-- and make the deserving very, very rich. Internet wonks and tech firms are full of techno-libertarians who believe that computers make the market work better, and that markets fix everything in the end. It's an understandable belief. Computers are a disruptive technology, and disruptive technologies always (initially) upset rigid class boundaries. For this reason, tech is full of people who made it to the top because of skill, intelligence, and perseverance in a way that older industries are not.
However, this fact has led to blind spots about the history of the industry, and why the computer industry looks the way it does. The fact is that the US government spent its way to US dominance in the computer market in the era when the British really had a chance to be players.
This is a widely-established fact, a matter of public record, even if it isn't often brought up in the mythos of American computing and Silicon Valley. For a single, easily readable account, see Roy Rosenzweig's historiographical article "Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet," recently collected in his posthumous volume Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age
That the Cold War. . .fostered the development of digital computers is relatively easy to show. In 1950, for example, the federal government-- overwhelmingly, its military agencies-- provided 75 to 80 percent of computer development funds. Even when companies began funding their own research and development, they did so with the knowledge of a guaranteed military market. Such massive government support enabled American computer research to destroy foreign (mostly British) competition; the American hegemony in computer markets-- routinely attributed to American free markets-- rests on a solid base of government-subsidized military funding. "The computerization of society," writer Frank Rose aptly observes, "has essentially been a side effect of the computerization of war."
So why this collective amnesia in the tech industry about who has been filling its coffers for most of the last half-century? I would argue that it's a problem of what Suzanne Mettler has described as "the submerged state." That is: beneficiaries of government successful government programs have a tendency to forget that they are the beneficiaries of government programs. They tend to think of their success as their own, over-emphasizing the importance of their own accomplishments and underestimating the institutional structures that allowed them to achieve them. Just like how 45% of recipients of unemployment insurance claimed to not be beneficiaries of government programs, the American tech industry sees government grants and contracts as a right, as something earned, not as a hand up.
That someone as intelligent as Schmidt could overlook this difference in subsidy defies reason, especially since he himself is a beneficiary of that same fountain of money. Google would never have existed without the Department of Defense's funding of the proto-Internet ARPANET, or without military and other government grants and contracts with Stanford where Larry and Sergey did the original work on PageRank, just to name the two most obvious.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think that students do need a "license to tinker" And if Schmidt is honestly trying to get the British to follow Barak Obama's lead in funding more education Engineers, I support that. He's right, "the world needs more engineers." My primary reason for writing this is primarily to point out that blaming the British tech market for not keeping up with America's on issues of curricula seems, historically speaking, colossally unfair.
But there's something more, too-- I think that Schmidt's tenuous grasp on his industry's history belies the difficulty with his desire to return to 19th century standards of education:
"It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges," he said. "Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."
This is all true, of course. But the issue that I have is this: in a time when America is in the middle of a blame-the-teacher-first "educational reform" movement, when the British government is in the middle of austerity reforms, a call for this sort of integrated liberal education is likely to fall on deaf ears, and more likely to be interpreted as a call to defund the humanities, rather than simply beef up funding for science education.
And this is dangerous. It's dangerous because Eric Schmidt is a Very Clever Fellow, and he missed a very fundamental point about the history of the industry that has made him a billionaire. In a world where history becomes a generalist hobby for businessmen and engineers, where funding is taken away from the humanities, we are likely to only see far more misunderstandings like this. And failing to understand the history of a subject tends to make it very easy to make very, very bad decisions about the future.
Google+ Thought of the Day…
While it was under development, Google+ was for a while referred to as “Google Me.”
While it was under development, Google was at one point called “Backrub.”
This means that in some alternate reality, there’s a world where Google+ is called “Backrub Me.”
So You Want Me To Switch To Google+?
So I got an invite a couple days ago to Google Plus, and generally, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm not leaving twitter any time soon, because I like it as an aggregator and a public discussion forum.
But I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for it. I was never really a big fan of Facebook in the first place. When it was really taking off, I would read about it-- being a grad student in Boston, interested in technology and culture, I was really curious. But I couldn't access it. The Winklevossian commitment to exclusivity that was baked into it from the start saw the school where I was doing my MA as not worthy of inclusion. I think UMass Boston students had Facebook opened up to their .edu addresses a couple weeks before it just opened to everyone and their grandma. I ended up only getting a Facebook account once I started TAing while working on my PhD coursework, as a way to try to put the names of some 150 students with faces. So while I'm a pretty frequent user of Facebook, I've never felt much fondness for it. I'd be glad to go.
So-- you there, over at Google! You want me to switch over to Google+, and drop my Facebook account all together? I'm ripe for it, and I'm not asking much in return.
All I want is this: we need to start a real discussion about what DATA EXPORTABILITY looks like for social networks.
I know Google has a great record in terms of data exportability and open standards compared to any other tech company its size. And I know that, from the get-go, Google+ has come with a way to export your data in a fairly granular way, and that's a good start. I want more, though. I want a discussion.
You see, Facebook has a way to export your data, too-- go to Settings, and scroll down to Export Data. And at least Google gives us a human-readable, stable URL for this process.
And I believe Eric Schmidt when he says that he thinks there's room for multiple Social Networking platforms, and that Google's trying to play nicely with Facebook and Twitter. I believe that because Google's model has long been to improve the overall internet experience, to keep people online more, so they keep coming back to Google and its ads, as opposed to Facebook's walled-garden approach.
But again, all of this is not quite enough. We're at a major turn, here. Integrating social will be a huge boon to Google in terms of personalized search and finding ways to leverage the social graph. And I'll get on board right now. But in return I want a discussion to happen, here.
What do I want this discussion to look like? It's pretty simple. I want Google to invite outsiders to the table to have an honest discussion about what users might be able to expect in return for granting Google access to their social graph. Our social data is going to help drive search-- social is going to influence how much of that fabled "Google Juice" a site or a post might have. When will that weighting data fall under the company's commitment to data exportability?
And when will that commitment lead to them using Google+ as a platform to help create open data standards for social? Because exportability without standards is of very limited utility. Once I can export my data and migrate it to another platform-- maybe even one that could still interact with Google+-- that's when we've really got data exportability that means something.
Google has a good record with standards, and I think that this would undergird Schmidt's point. I think it would be in their interest, as traditionally defined-- keeping people on the net by making the internet better-- and it could potentially force Facebook to rethink its closed approach or risk irrelevence.
So yeah, Google-- let's get this conversation started. I'm ready to switch.