Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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I DID have student loans, and I DID go to graduate school. And my first three careers after school had nothing whatsoever to do with EITHER of my degrees.
I’m not saying you have to go to that extreme. I suspect a handful of careers is enough for most people. LOL
[Kylee Wall] “…if I stayed in my first steady job and never bought any gear until my student loans were paid off, I’d still be at that crappy gig with no end in sight. It seems short-sighted to put your life on hold until one thing is paid.”
My father has changed careers even more than I have, and he made quite a few of those changes while he had young kids at home. We moved a bunch. Someone might lament all that as some sign of crumbling modern whatever, but my experience was the opposite. I lived in big towns, small ones, rural flatlands and islands, from northern New England to southern California, from Florida to Oregon, and, okay, a little too long in Texas. LOL I love this whole dang country, and just about every way there is to live in it. I LOVE adapting.
(I also look at American history and see multi-generational roots as the exception, not the rule. There’s no more American trait than migration, our tragic history of forced migrations notwithstanding.)
I learned adaptation from my parents, and I assure you there was no money to fall back on. Things were sometimes tough, but it was an adventure. We had fun. I think I was very well served by my experience that there are always new ways and new places to grow.
I also think that that experience is more critical than ever, as we move increasingly into a world where career changes aren’t our ideas. If your primary stance to the world is an experience of flexibility and adaptation, then you can more quickly start to see the opportunity that lies on the other side of the crisis.
The last observation I’ll make is that 2 of my last 3 careers didn’t exist when I was in college. Preparing for them was not an option EXCEPT to the extent that I’ve been in the habit of getting into new habits on a regular basis. Who knows? My next career might not exist yet either.
Knowing that you CAN make those kinds of changes, because you’ve MADE those kinds of changes is better than getting into a situation where your career vanishes out from under you in ten years, yes?
This is going further afield that I meant to, and I’ll bow out from here. But my point is still the same. If what you really really really want is to drive straight on ’til sunrise, then go for it, my friend. I just wouldn’t want anyone looking for career advice to ONLY get advice for the best way to keep going straight.
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On the flip side, I’m on my sixth or seventh career in 30 years, only half of them even vaguely related to even one of the other. The energy I spent on trying to get ahead in my then-current career, in retrospect, would have been better spent on literally anything. Reading. Cheese making. Lifting weights. Watching TV. Sex. Name it.
The thing is, I was passionate, committed, and laser-focused on each of those careers. Absolutely loved them. But the idea of picking a thing, or even a matrix of related things, to build an entire life around is horrifying to me. The irreplaceable treasures I’ve picked up along a path I’d never have predicted is my favorite thing about my life.
You have been given a gift of almost incalculable value: a steady job at a young age. My suggestion: use this period of relative safety to prepare to blow it all up before you’re 30, at the latest. Follow your interests and instincts, remembering that “career path” doesn’t mean just one career. And it may not even look like a path at all until you’re looking back on it.
It’s good that you’re thinking about this now, and I’m glad that you’re asking yourself what this job will offer you in a few years. The answer might be “Nothing.” At which point do something else.
These other fellas are steering you straight, but that’s only helpful if you want to keep driving straight. I’d just add that there are rewards that can only be found on the other side of the horizon, which I’ve always thought of as my starting place. I can SEE the horizon. Why stop there?
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[Bob Zelin] “When did FOOT BALL become an inappropriate word ?
“I’m going to expand on Abraham’s succinct answer to give you a bigger picture.
The filter started when spammers around the world began offering pirated streams. Which of course are fraudulent schemes for things much more nefarious.
This was one of our biggest spam words during the World Cup, but will actually increase as the NFL season goes on as well. The spam usage of that word also skyrockets during college Bowl season. We get POUNDED with bogus offers for watching your favorite team without paying for cable or DirecTV.
We actually first introduced that filter when spammers started inundating us with spam offering March Madness for free. I can’t even begin to stress the scale of this. INUNDATED.
The demand for sports is what’s enabling cable companies to pay multi-billion dollar deals for LOCAL sports in markets like LA. They know they’ll make that money back in spades. It’s why the YES cable channels is worth more than the New York Yankees baseball team that it covers. It’s why cable operators are paying nearly $6 per subscriber for ESPN. It’s how a cable company can afford to buy a major movie studio.
Spammers are very aware of this, and will continue to exploit the demand to try to get sports without paying for cable and satellite. It’s getting worse and worse as time goes by.
The fact is that we might catch a user or two in a post or two, a couple of times a month across the entire COW with filters like this. But the fact is that we might fend off THOUSANDS of sports spam posts PER DAY, with spikes during the year that are even higher.
We’ve had this filter for years, and the one for hoops much, much longer, but you’ve not noticed until now. Most people have never noticed at all, and likely never will.
It’s a small, virtually painless solution to what was formerly one of our biggest problems.
Probably more answer than you were looking for, but I gotta tell you, I was fascinated to see it emerge as a problem maybe 7 or 8 years ago, and it’s definitely getting worse.
Tim Wilson
Creative COW -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “again – for posterity: 240 fps mobile telephones? “
(Also by way of noting that, in response to a number of member requests, the COW now supports animated gifs!)
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[Mitch Ives] “I think we all understand that you can’t comment…”
Ah, but I can, and I have. 🙂 I greatly appreciate the leeway you folks give me to comment personally as separate from my professional capacity.
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I’m not commenting one way or another on the subscription software front. I’m just making the observation that subscription music and TV, and subscription software have nothing to do with each other.
I’m making the further observation that antipathy to software subscriptions is leading some people to make exactly the wrong reading of Apple’s plans.
a) Apple is not killing off their subscription PLANS, and
b) it makes no sense to compare ownership vs. subscription in media to ownership vs. subscription for software, which
c) all but the most ardent philosophical holdouts know, because they already consume the majority of their media through a subscription.
I think that Apple adding subscriptions to their mix is critical for their music business. Music revenue per iTunes user is down by 50% in the past 2 years alone, and the decline is accelerating, because the sales-based business model for music is rapidly declining, and is being replaced with subscriptions.
Not as fast as video sales, mind you, where the sales model has cratered.
You can be sure that Apple noticed that the average Spotify customer spends 2-3 times in a MONTH what the average iTunes customer spends in a QUARTER. The money is INSANE, because when given a comparable selection of music, people ARE CHOOSING to spend MORE to subscribe than they were spending to buy, and they’re happier with it.
This is not a debate. It is happening. Apple has watched Spotify pass its revenue in Europe, and now that Spotify is available is in the US, it’s happening here too. Which is a big part of why Apple bought Beats. (Although it would have made a good business deal just for the headphones.)
This is also not Apple’s first move into streaming music. They bought Lala in 2009, a much smaller service (only an $80 million cash/$80 million stock and options deal), but technology that Apple moved into iTunes radio.
So, yes, Apple killed Lala, but rolled up the technology, before greatly expanding it. And yes, Beats Music as a standalone entity will die, but only after Apple has rolled up its technology and greatly expanded it. Apple’s move into subscription music is accelerating, because around the world, where high-quality options are available, people are in fact spending MORE money to SUBSCRIBE to music than buy it.
Just as people have been spending more money to SUBSCRIBE to TV and movies than BUY them.
Which has NOTHING to do with subscription vs. sales for software. Nothing at all.
Don’t take your eye off the ball. Apple will be playing a colossal role in the Netflix-ization of music that has already been accelerating past Apple’s dramatically declining sales model. It’s a many billions of dollar business, mind you, and it’s ridiculous to say it’s going away — but Apple is no longer in first place, and is fading fast, for the simple reason that it has the wrong business model for how people ARE — not theoretically, but ARE — choosing to enjoy music.
Which is the same way they have increasingly been enjoying movies and TV shows.
Which, again, has nothing to do with software.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “the Joseph Eichler quote has some truth to it, even if it took Apple a while to get there.”
That’s not what Steve said. He said that’s what he did when he introduced Mac. This was an out and out lie/reminaging/retelling/misremebering/remythologizing, WHATEVER. But not not not not true.
The only products for which it was ever true had an “i” in front, and to that extent, his statement expressed an aspiration…which is also not what he said, and begs the question of the extent to which he wanted even iMac to be for the masses, or the extent of his failure that it’s not.
And I think very highly of iMac mind you. But the whole “for the masses” thing was him blowing smoke up his own skirt.
[Jeremy Garchow] “My view on this is much less maniacal,”
None of the facts I mentioned are in dispute. They’re all Steve’s words, and they’re all in context. You can LIKE him more than I do, but those are in fact the words of an actual maniac in the clinical sense. Removing any pejorative sense of the word, but speaking as a former clinician, he was at LEAST hypomanic…and, as I mentioned, most geniuses are, if not hyPERmanic. Again not the least pejorative. Mentally stable people tend not to be revolutionaries.
I was merely calling Steve out for glibly reciting a myth of himself that never happened.
But as a self-aggrandizing borderline sociopath myself, I deeply admire him. I just wished that, unlike Steve, I’d been able to make some money from it. LOL
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “that’s a killer quote.”
It’s also entirely untrue.
The Mac was among the most expensive personal computers at the time. It was most definitely NOT intended as a mass market product, nor was it a mainstream product at Apple.
Apple’s mainstream development and marketing was on the Apple II, which absolutely WAS a mass market product, and held a market share that Mac has yet to achieve much more than half of. And it had a color screen!
Is any mass market product a success if it hasn’t reached the mass of the market? Maybe so, but it certainly flies in the face of Steve’s later contention that Apple didn’t want the biggest marketshare. He used BMW as his example of a company with only 3% market share whose success was indisputable.
Hmmmm…Apple like a luxury car maker. Perhaps one whose products represent a degree of status accorded by, among other things, their price. Hmmmm…..
Mac was clean and simple, yes, but his ability to rewrite his own story on the fly was unparalleled. It was so common that the people around him came up with a name for it: the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. The term certainly came to represent other things, including Steve’s motivational abilities and general charisma….but it doesn’t change for a minute that he’d make this stuff up about himself to suit whatever he wanted you to think about him at the time.
He used it repeatedly over the years to simultaneously piss on what his competitors were doing, while providing aircover for himself to do it later. It served the additional function of getting the people who loved him to NOT buy these features from other people, but to instead wait for Apple to provide them.
The first example was in fact the original Mac, introduced in black and white on a 9-inch screen, despite the fact that larger, color screens were already common. Graphic artists don’t want to work in color, Steve said, so there was no color Mac. Graphic artists want to work on a screen about the width of a piece of paper. Needless to say, immediately after being fired from Apple, the computer company he started had ONLY color monitors, and much wider than a piece of paper.
Here are some others:
Just before Apple announced the iPad mini, Steve Jobs:
“[A 7-inch tablet] is meaningless unless your tablet includes sandpaper,” Jobs said, “so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.” He said 7-inch screens were actually 45 per cent the size of an iPad, which wasn’t sufficient.
“Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff,” he added. “There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touchscreen, which is why we think 10 inches is the minimum.”
Of course, long before that, in 2003, he pissed on the idea of tablets at all.
It turns out people want keyboards. I mean, when I started in this business one of the biggest challenges was that people couldn’t type. And one day we realized that death would eventually take care of this. And so, people know how to type now. And if you do email of any volume, you gotta have a keyboard.
So we look at the tablet and we think it’s gonna fail.
The follow-up was maybe, but tablets are good for reading and he replied with one of my favorite quotes of his:
It’s really true, if you’ve got a bunch or rich guys who can afford their third computers. You know they’ve got their desktop, they got a portable, and now they got one of these to read with, that’s your market.
People accuse US of niche markets!
So not only does he want YOU, dear Apple customer, to think that tablets are a non-starter, he wants YOU, dear Apple customer, to think that people with tablets are hipster d-bags…until of course Apple releases one.
And another classic quote on why he didn’t support video on the original iPod, when this was already common from other vendors.
It turns out that watching movies on a tiny screen isn’t very much fun. The best way to watch movies is to buy a personal computer.
I’m certain that many of you Applephiles will retort that this was all strategic disinformation. Perhaps.
But the BIGGEST part of the smokescreen was aimed at YOU. The feature doesn’t exist, and if it exists, is exclusively the domain of hyper-affluent d-bags with bad taste….until we bring it to you next year, when it will be yet another triumph of the Apple innovation you hold so dear.
A genius, yes, but, like many geniuses, maybe most geniuses, a self-aggrandizing borderline sociopath whose greatest creation is himself.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “that’s a killer quote.”
It’s also entirely untrue.
The Mac was among the most expensive personal computers at the time. It was most definitely NOT intended as a mass market product, nor was it a mainstream product at Apple.
Apple’s mainstream development and marketing was on the Apple II, which absolutely WAS a mass market product, and held a market share that Mac has yet to achieve more than half of.
Clean and simple, yes, but his ability to rewrite his own story on the fly was unparalleled. It was so common that the people around him came up with a name for it: the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. The term certainly came to represent other things, including Steve’s motivational abilities and general charisma….but it doesn’t change for a minute that he’d make this stuff up about himself to suit whatever he wanted you to think about him at the time.
He used it repeatedly over the years to simultaneously piss on what his competitors were doing, while providing aircover for himself to do it later. It served the additional function of getting the people who loved him to NOT buy these features from other people, but to instead wait for Apple to provide them.
The first example was in fact the original Mac, introduced in black and white on a 9-inch screen, despite the fact that larger, color screens were already common. Graphic artists don’t want to work in color, Steve said, so there was no color Mac. Graphic artists want to work on a screen about the width of a piece of paper. Needless to say, immediately after being fired from Apple, the computer company he started had ONLY color monitors, and much wider than a piece of paper.
Here are some others:
Just before Apple announced the iPad mini, Steve Jobs:
“[A 7-inch tablet] is meaningless unless your tablet includes sandpaper,” Jobs said, “so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.” He said 7-inch screens were actually 45 per cent the size of an iPad, which wasn’t sufficient.
“Apple has done extensive user testing and we really understand this stuff,” he added. “There are clear limits on how close you can place things on a touchscreen, which is why we think 10 inches is the minimum.”
Of course, long before that, in 2003, he pissed on the idea of tablets at all.
It turns out people want keyboards. I mean, when I started in this business one of the biggest challenges was that people couldn’t type. And one day we realized that death would eventually take care of this. And so, people know how to type now. And if you do email of any volume, you gotta have a keyboard.
So we look at the tablet and we think it’s gonna fail.
The follow-up was maybe, but tablets are good for reading and he replied with one of my favorite quotes of his:
It’s really true, if you’ve got a bunch or rich guys who can afford their third computers. You know they’ve got their desktop, they got a portable, and now they got one of these to read with, that’s your market.
People accuse US of niche markets!
So not only does he want YOU, dear Apple customer, to think that tablets are a non-starter, he wants YOU, dear Apple customer, to think that people with tablets are hipster d-bags…until of course Apple releases one.
And another classic quote on why he didn’t support video on the original iPod, when this was already common from other vendors.
It turns out that watching movies on a tiny screen isn’t very much fun. The best way to watch movies is to buy a personal computer.
I’m certain that many of you Applephiles will retort that this was all strategic disinformation. Perhaps.
But the BIGGEST part of the smokescreen was aimed at YOU. The feature doesn’t exist, and if it exists, is exclusively the domain of hyper-affluent d-bags with bad taste….until we bring it to you next year, when it will be yet another triumph of the Apple innovation you hold so dear.
A genius, yes, but, like many geniuses, maybe most geniuses, a self-aggrandizing borderline sociopath whose greatest creation is himself.
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Whatever Apple’s plans are, it doesn’t change the fact that music has been proven to be viable via a subscription model. Spotify alone is on track to pass iTunes music sales revenue later this year. It would be sheer insanity for Apple to let iTunes music sales keep dropping when the alternative is out there, available, and eating their lunch.
Oh wait, it’s not OUT THERE. Apple has it in house. If you don’t think it’s worth $3 billion to Apple to stop the bleeding in its music business, you’re wrong. Sorry to be so blunt, but this is simply a fact.
I really don’t think people here have reckoned with this. iTunes is about to no longer be the biggest source of revenue for the music business. Spotify is. And Spotify is going up, and iTunes is going down. And Spotify is just one subscription vendor.
And Apple is not in the business of being in declining businesses.
Hey, wait a minute, you know what else works for subscriptions besides music?
Television. People have been subscribing to it for generations. If they want to buy it, they certainly can — but which is a more viable long-term model for TV watching? People WATCHING it, or people OWNING it? Watching. NOT owning.
You know what else works for subscriptions besides music and TV?
Movies. Movie streaming and rentals have been skyrocketing of late, while sales of disks plummet. Even digital sales are next to nothing. So which is the more viable long-term model for home video? People WATCHING it, or people OWNING it. Watching. NOT owning.
There is admittedly an age bias at work here. Ownership and age are inversely related. It’s not shocking to me that many geezers are beside themselves thinking about music streaming, when in fact they’ve been doing it with TV virtually their entire lives, and all but the most hoardy geezerific have streamed more in their short time on Netflix streaming than they’ve bought in their long, long lives. Such long, long lives. Very, very long.
So relax, Bill. You’re already enjoying streaming media. You can still buy dang near whatever you want. Apple isn’t about to let the iTunes music business go away, but they won’t let it keep going down the drain with the sales model either. They’re doing what they’ve done so many times before — let other people do the experimentation first, buy an up-and-coming player, then follow the money while upping the interface game. I can’t imagine that a streaming iTunes will look anything like Beats (we can only hope), and lord knows that Spotify is ripe for being bettered.
This is going to work out fine for you. It’s going to work out fine for Apple, too, as long as they saddle up for an ALREADY ESTABLISHED streaming business that’s pulling ahead of them.
And lo and behold, they are.
