Textbook stuff, revised edition…

source: Lee LeBlanc

The story recounted in “Textbook stuff…“– “United Breaks Guitars,” now sitting at over 2 million views, up from 250,000 two days ago– continues to unfold.  United has responded, offering belatedly to pay for the damages.  Dave Carroll, leader of Sons of Maxwell and composer of the song, has responded (see it here on Youtube), proposing that, after all this time, United should just give the money to charity.

United has also suggested (for instance, to the Chicago Tribune, in an interview featured in this coverage of the incident) that the carrier could use the video internally to help change its culture– a prospect that Carroll applauds: “It could be used to improve the way passengers are treated around the world.”

But for all the hits on Youtube, has there actually been a meaningful hit to United?

Kevin May, writing at Travolution, suggests not: “…the reality is that the ‘complaint’ has probably done more to boost the profile of Canadian rockers Sons of Maxwell than it has impacted on the ticket sales of United Airlines.”

In the short-run, I suspect that’s right: Carroll and crew have certainly gotten a lift, and United ticket sales are likely holding.  But then, ticket sales these days are largely made via constraints–  corporate travel deals that result in policies restricting employees to a single carrier; dominant/sole carriers offering the only option on many routes, etc.– or as a product of cut-to-the-bone promotional pricing.  And as bad as United’s service is, the universe of choice on most routes in the U.S. offers very few real service alternatives.  I typically fly 100,000-150,000 miles domestically per year and would suggest that, with the exception of a few relatively small carriers like Virgin America, the level of service is pretty uniformly terrible and continuing to deteriorate.  So, United breaks guitars…  but where are you going to go?  (I’ve written before about this “race to the bottom” and why, I believe, it is happening.)

But does this kind of “default impunity” mean that United and the other underdelivering members of their competitive class breeze through episodes like this with no damage at all?  I think not.  There seem to me at least three ways in which being called out in this way will take its toll:

• While much/most of United’s traffic is prescribed, a good bit of it’s most profitable traffic is on more competitive international routes.  “United Breaks Guitars” has suggested to millions that, given the choice, it’s better to fly Virgin or Singapore or BA or Lufthansa…  And when these travelers do take foreign flag carriers (if their experience is anything like mine over the last several years) they will realize that there are airlines with decent service… they’re just not the big U.S. carriers.  And so more and more of these travelers will make their future decisions for travel on those more lucrative routes accordingly.

• It’s no fun working for a company that is the butt of jokes (or worse, as in the case of Northwest in Detroit for example, the target of focused customer hostility).  Employees can feel defeated, can become cynical, or both… and when they do, service tends to deteriorate further.  But more immediately painful to United, it aggravates relations with their employees.  In my experience, United’s line employees are neither stupid nor evil; they are, in their own ways, prisoners of the same broken system that victimizes travelers.  Indeed, increasingly as I travel I’ve seen defensiveness about “the way things are” give way to defeated embarrassment…  and when one’s job is an embarrassment, one tends to take it out on the company.  In the past, that’s taken the form of asking for more money, “battle pay.”  In this economy, it appears to be accruing as a general “uncooperativeness.”  In either case, it severely impacts United’s ability– the ability of any company in this kind of situation– to act effectively.

• In the longer run, United (and all of the hub-and-spokes legacy carriers) are vulnerable to a different approach to delivering air travel (see here and here). That threat will become a reality when both the emergent alternatives and consumer demand for them reach critical mass.  Episodes like “United Breaks Guitars” move consumers toward that critical mass, toward affirmative willingness to make the switch.  (And, as the experience of ATT through “deregulation” and break-up suggests, it also contributes to a political climate in which incumbents are vulnerable…)  When a shift like this happens it can feel surprisingly fast and complete– and thus likely feel to the legacy carriers in the U.S like an implosion. But in fact, it’s been steadily building, via incidents like this.  In the end, it is the festering of disappointed demand, finally enabled by new solutions, that creates “catastrophe” for incumbents like United–c.f., e.g., the “inevitable surpirse” of newspapers in the U.S.

So in the short run, “United Breaks Guitars” may just be another flash across the web, with little or no immediate effect on United’s bottom line.  But more fundamentally it– and the systemic issues the episode illustrates– could prove deadly.

Textbook stuff…

…  in the next generation of marketing textbooks, anyway:

Sons of Maxwell on being “serviced” by United Airlines. (Read the details of the episode in the sidebar on the right, or here.)

Up for under two days as I write this, and  already seen by well over 250,000 (growing rapidly), with a solid five-star rating…

Which is more than we can say for United.

Just a(nother) a reminder to those marketers aggressively  promising service they’re not prepared to deliver that the implicit protections of the “old” broadcast communications world are gone; the web will out their failures, and fast.  So more money invested in empty messaging– however elegant, as in United’s animated spots– is worse than wasted:  it concretely confirms consumers’ suspicions of hypocrisy.

Increasingly, when it comes to advertising in all its forms, you can (still) run, but you cannot hide.

When you stack it all up…

Our nation’s birthday…  a time to look back, to consider our triumphs and failures, to put our current situation into perspective, and to search for lessons that might help us better navigate into our future…

From Barry Ritholtz, financial analyst and author of Bailout Nation, in his Big Picture blog:

It is exceedingly difficult to convey exactly how much we are spending on all these bailouts. Whenever I start talking trillions (versus mere billions), I get puzzled looks from people. Humans have a hard time conceptualizing any number that large.  I wanted a graphic way to clearly show how astonishingly ginormous the amounts involved were.

So I once again went to Jess Bachman at Wallstats. I gave him my list of expenditures [bailout expenses, and major national investments/expenses since 1803] (inflation adjusted of course!) and he went to work. This early Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or  otherwise committed.

It is nothing short of astonishing.

It includes the total outlay for all the bailouts to date. In just about one short year (March 2008 -  March 2009), the bailouts managed to spend far in excess of nearly every major one time expenditure of the USA, including WW1&2 (omitted from graphic), the moon shot, the New Deal, total NASA budgets (omitted from graphic), Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars — COMBINED.

206 years versus 12 months. Total cost: ~$15 trillion and counting . . .

click here for a larger view

(For a strikingly– and depressingly– clear graphic explanation of how we got into this mess, click here for another collaboration between Ritholtz and Wallstats.)

But lest we end on too grim a note, this morning’s update from Jim Fallows:

Yesterday, as part of the Atlantic’s role in the Ideas Festival, I got to moderate a discussion among some 30 people who were big shots from public and private realms. The presidents of two of the leading research universities in the world. A sitting governor. The CEO of a major (non-US based) technology firm. Scholars and public officials and financiers and economists and corporate executives and writers. Unlike most of the sessions here (see videos etc at this main page), these mealtime discussions are not on-the-record so I’m not supposed to give a blow-by-blow.

But I can say that at the end of the discussion I asked for a show of hands on a simple good news / bad news question. The question was whether the current economic/political/environmental emergency around the world would be a “successful crisis” or a “failed crisis.” That, is would today’s sense of emergency lead the United States, in particular, to address some of its fundamental fiscal, political, social, environmental, educational, etc problems, so that it came out of the crisis stronger than it went in? Or would it be a missed opportunity, a “wasted crisis,” in which the U.S. system would avoid dealing with any fundamental issues and therefore would come out of the immediate travails in worse shape than when it went in?

The results were three- or four- to one positive. Nearly twenty people voted for the “successful crisis” interpretation; only five or six expected a “failed crisis.” This is not proof, and it may be simple wish fulfillment. But I was surprised by the results — and, how could I help but be? encouraged by them.

So, the good news first, or the bad?…

Let’s end on an upbeat note, so start with…

The bad news…

source: Hadley Centre for Climate Change (via Global Warming Art)

A recent MIT study suggests that the problems associated with global warming will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago – and could be even worse than that.

The work is based on MIT’s Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the university since the early 1990s.  And its results add to the chorus of researchers suggesting that earlier estimates– like the assessment of the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)– materially understate the threat.

(As Larry Smarr of Cal IT2 explained to me recently, a good bit of the difference was likely methodological: the scientists involved in that earlier work, concerned to be rigorous, excluded from consideration forces/dynamics that couldn’t be measured and projected as precisely as the forces/dynamics that were included– even if those “rejected” forces/dynamics were suspected, even known, to have an impact.  In the intervening time, measurement capability has improved…  and thus, the picture has deteriorated.)

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees…  To put that in perspective, consider this piece (from the Times of London), reporting on models built by the UK Government’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change:

Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was desert. It suffered a short reprise during the dust- bowl years of the 1930s, when the topsoil blew away and hundreds of thousands of refugees trailed through the dust to an uncertain welcome further west. The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great feat of imagination.

The western United States once again could suffer perennial droughts, far worse than the 1930s. Deserts will reappear particularly in Nebraska, but also in eastern Montana, Wyoming and Arizona, northern Texas and Oklahoma. As dust and sandstorms turn day into night across thousands of miles of former prairie, farmsteads, roads and even entire towns will be engulfed by sand.

What’s bad for America will be worse for poorer countries closer to the equator. The Hadley Centre calculates that a one-degree increase would eliminate fresh water from a third of the world’s land surface by 2100…

But of course, MIT is worried that the increase will be much higher than just 1 degree.  What do those extra increments of heat portend?  Nothing good.  Further from the Hadley Centre report:

Here is a degree-by-degree guide:

1c Increase- Ice-free sea absorbs ?more heat and accelerates global warming; fresh water lost from a third of the world’s surface; low-lying coastlines flooded

2c Increase- Europeans dying of heatstroke; forests ravaged by fire; stressed plants beginning to emit carbon rather than absorbing it; a third of all species face extinction

3c Increase- Carbon release from vegetation and soils; speeds global warming; death of the Amazon rainforest; super-hurricanes hit coastal cities; starvation in Africa

4c Increase- Runaway thaw of permafrost makes global warming unstoppable; much of Britain made uninhabitable by severe flooding; Mediterranean region abandoned

5c Increase- Methane from ocean floor accelerates global warming; ice gone from both poles; humans migrate in search of food and try vainly to live like animals off the land

6c Increase- Life on Earth ends with apocalyptic storms, flash floods, hydrogen sulphide gas and methane fireballs racing across the globe with the power of atomic bombs; only fungi survive

Chance of avoiding six degrees of global warming: zero if the rise passes five degrees, by which time all feedbacks will be running out of control

Now these are projections, the products of models; the reality will be surely be different.  But if there’s anything to the MIT study and the Hadley projection of consequences– anything at all– then we’ve got lots of work to do in reducing emissions– and fast.

UPDATE:  a link to the recent report of the U.S. Government’s U.S. Global Change Research Program: more evidence (as if we needed it) that this threat is real, and another take– slightly less dramatic; still deeply troubling– on its potential impacts.

The good news…

Selling nano refrigerators in Osmanabad

One of the obstacles to executing an effective global strategy to combat global warming– and of course it does have to be a global strategy– is that, while it’s painful for developed nations to make the necessary adjustments, it’s even harder for developing nations. Their emerging middle classes aspire to the same sorts of luxuries that their predecessors in the West have enjoyed.  Suggesting to, say, a hardworking Chinese family that it should not get a car after all, or to an Indian family that it should forgo the refrigeration for which it has saved, is a tough sale– one that smacks of entitled Westerners pulling the ladder up behind themselves.

The climate data sketched above suggests that the resolution to this dilemma can’t be simple comprise– a chicken in every other pot, as it were– that only yields an outcome slightly less catastrophic.  Rather, the answer has to come from a leap, a transcending of the old trade-offs.  Innovation must be yoked to the creation of new kinds of products and services, delivered in new kinds of ways– products, services, and systems that radically reduce the amount of carbon consumed;  products, services, and systems that are genuinely sustainable.

Happily, that innovation is underway.  And it’s happening as quickly and impactfully in the developing world as in the West.

By way of encouraging example, Outlook Business (India) reports on a new “nano-fridge,” the ChotuKool:

ChotuKool is like no other fridge. It does not have a compressor. It runs on a battery. Utensils and bottles need to be loaded into this 43-litre cool box from the top. It weighs only 7.8 kg and costs only Rs 3,200 [under $70].

The ChotuKool was co-designed with village women to assure its acceptability, and is distributed by members of a micro-finance group.  It’s a triumph of applying creative economic development thinking to the satisfaction of emergent consumer demand– in this case, demand for a product, a refrigerator, that is an avatar of emergence into the middle class.

And critically importantly, it is a step toward sustainability.  In order to make the fridges viable for rural distribution and use, the manufacturer (consumer durables firm Godrej & Boyce) shrank the standard size– reducing materials use– and replaced the usual compressor with a battery-powered heat exchanger. The upshot of which is a fridge that is less carbon (and other resource) intensive– and at the same time, cheaper– than usual.

And this is the good news:  necessity being the mother that it is, innovators all over the world– but critically importantly, in developing economies– are coming up with answers to consumer demand that redefine products as we’ve known them, making them cheaper and more sustainable at the same time.

C. K. Prahalad argued in Bottom of the Pyramid (c.f., e.g., here), that serving the poorest of the world can and should be good for business:  it’s a gargantuan market in its own right , and what’s learned there can be applied in the developed world. Examples like the nano-fridge suggest that connecting the ingenuity and the enormous potential there can be critically important to managing global climate change as well.  Prahad once said,

I am continually humbled by the inventiveness of the people who want to serve this population.

I too am humbled– and with an eye to the encroaching waterline of San Francisco Bay, I’m very, very grateful.

Bookending an era in U.S. Retail?…

From (Roughly) Daily, a guest post that addresses (in reverse order) two phenomena, one of which contributed mightily to the rise of “Mall Culture” in the U.S.; the other, quite possibly, to its fall…

(copyright, Norm Feuti)

Americans are saving more…  which means that they are spending less.  Earlier this year average household debt was 134% of average household disposable income.  If increased savings lowers that to, say, 100% (by way of comparison, the figure was in the 70% range in the Eighties), and the savings rate (which was essentially zero just before the bubble burst) returns to its historic (70-year) average of 9%, it will pull something like $4 trillion out of annual consumption…  that’s to say it would reduce consumption by over 20%.  And since consumption has been running over 70% of our roughly $13 Trillion GDP, that could make a dent in the trajectory of our consumer-driven society.  A pretty big dent.*

How might it accrue? Well, there’s the impact on corporate earnings and employment (in an industrial/service base already at pretty serious overcapacity…  and then there are the Dead Malls.

* for more on this phenomenon and what it might mean, this post in Jon Taplin’s blog is a good place to start (for a more apocalyptic view, see Dmitri Orlov’s recent talk in Dublin)…  and for a peek at what could become of malls needy of a new purpose, see this post in The Infrastructuralist.

As we cinch up up belts, we might think back to one of the driving forces that created the milieu in which malls were born and flourished: on this date in 1956 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, landmark legislation that funded a 40,000-mile system of interstate roads that ultimately reached every American city with a population of more than 100,000. Today, almost 90% of the interstate system crosses rural areas, putting most citizens and businesses within driving distance of one another. Although Eisenhower’s rationale was martial (creating a road system on which convoys could travel more easily), the rewards were largely civilian. From the growth of trucking to the rise of suburbs, the interstate highway system re-shaped American landscapes and lives… and played a major role in creating the pre-conditions for the growth of the mall.

source: Missouri Department of Transportation

The Voices of America…

This evening New America Media will  bestow its annual Ethnic Media Awards.   At what is bound to be the most diverse gathering in Atlanta tonight, representatives of the 2500 ethnic media outlets around the U.S., who serve 51 million Americans– in 150 different languages– in all 50 states, will celebrate excellence in their field.

It’s a field to watch:  NAM was founded  by Sandy Close in 1996 as New California Media.  Sandy was acting on two key realizations; first, that California was on the leading edge of a demographic wave sweeping the U.S., as a product of which, by 2042, there will be no ethnic majority in the country (put another way, Non-Hispanic Whites will no longer be the majority; in 10% of U.S. counties this is already true);

source: Population Reference Bureau

Secondly, Sandy realized that “non-mainstream media,” largely the ethnic media, already reached more Californians than did the mainstream media– a reality that was “masked” by the fragmentation of the ethnic media landscape; at the same time, a reality sure to grow.

Indeed, it has grown.  And as it has, NCM became NAM, and expanded its services to the field.

NAM has become essential to the ethnic media community in the U.S. (and increasingly, abroad).  But it’s important– it’s essential– to us all.

• At a personal level, NAM provides a window through which any of us can better understand the rest of us.  (In a non-majority world, all of are “minorities,” with the cultural biases– too often, blinders– that come with our cultures.)
• At a professional level, NAM is education about, a window on, and a channel to the the colleagues and customers in our future.
• And most fundamentally importantly, because NAM is a critical resource to its ethnic media membership– journalists and communicators– it is critically important to the communities they serve.

As we look forward over the next few decades and the challenges that they hold, we realize that we Americans are in this together.  And we realize that we will succeed only to the extent that we find ways to celebrate and to harness the extraordinarily rich diversity that is our nation’s heritage and its hallmark.

NAM is working to help all of us hear all of the “Voices of America.”  It’s never been more important.

O. Henry’s version of The Law of the West…

From the ever-insightful xkcd, a cautionary tale, “Troll Slayer“:

Among those who might pause, internet marketers– who might note that the “law” in question turns out to look a lot like Gresham’s Law…

(Readers may remember  4chan.org from this post; but those unfamiliar with the trolls’ home board can read amusing things about it– e.g., how its members elevated 4chan’s founder to the top of Time’s “Most Influential” list– here.)

The past is prologue…

source

The continuing “economic unpleasantness” is driving more and more of us to search for analogs in our past from which we can learn. But as we search,  we might pause to remember what may be the most valuable lesson the past has to teach:  essentially, that Niels Bohr was right to proclaim that “Prediction is hard, especially of the future” (a sentiment also famously attributed to the philosopher Yogi Berra).

We might consider, for example, these forecasts, predictions, and prognostications (sourced from several places, mostly Wikiquote,  here and here)…

“Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions muts be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry. If mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry – an abberation which is happily almost impossible – it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science”
August Comte in Philosophic Positive (1830).

“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.” — Workers whom Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.

“The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” — Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.

“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.”
Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

“Everything that can be invented, has been invented.”
Charles H. Duel, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

“That Professor Goddard with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react–to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard’s revolutionary rocket work. (The remark was retracted in the July 17, 1969 issue.)

“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?”
David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urging for investment in the radio in 1920s.

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” — H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” — Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

“Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.”
Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949.

“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”
Editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” — Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

Commenting on the microchip: “But what is it good for?”
Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968.

“With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market.” — Business Week, August 2, 1968.

“It will be years — not in my time — before a woman will become Prime Minister.” — Margaret Thatcher, 1974.

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

“640kB ought to be enough for anybody.”
Bill Gates, 1981

… As we smile with the clarity of hindsight, we might remind ourselves that almost all of the “surprises” that confounded these expert convictions were happy surprises… We might embrace shoshin– that is, we might practice “beginner’s mind”…

And we might recall Arie de Geus’ wise words:

“the only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than your competition.”

A mouse that roars…

On the theme running in “I was aiming for my foot, but I seem to have shot myself in the thigh…” and “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” a guest post from Roughly Daily:

source

Long-time (pre-blog) readers will recall Brian Burton– aka Danger Mouse– and his Grey Album, a mash-up of the Beatles (White Album) and JayZ that landed Mr. Mouse in trouble with the Beatles’ distributor, EMI…  trouble that lingers.

So readers may be delighted-but-not-altogether-surprised at the release strategy for the new Danger Mouse album:  It’s  collaboration with David Lynch and Sparklehorse, featuring , among others, Julian Casablancas (The Strokes), Black Francis (The Pixies), Vic Chesnutt, The Flaming Lips, James Mercer (The Shins), Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), Jason Lytle (Grandaddy), Nina Person (The Cardigans), and Iggy Pop (Stooges, Bowie, et al.)…  pretty much a must-hear!

Rather than release this latest work in the traditional way, and face legal issues with EMI, Danger Mouse will be selling a blank CD-R along with lots of artwork.  Buyers will be responsible for finding the music themselves (indeed, it’s findable on the internet, e.g., here) and burning the CD.

One tips one’s ears to you, Mr. Mouse!

As we limber our surfing fingers and contemplate changes in retail-as-we-know-it, we might recall that it was on this date 161 years ago, in 1848, that the first real department store, Alexander Turney Stewart’s Marble Palace, at Broadway and Chambers Street in New York City, opened…

The Marble Palace
(later the home of the New York Sun; now a City office building)

The more things change, the more they stay the same…

source

About 12 years ago, I gave a talk to the senior-most executives of a global media company on what the internet was likely to mean to their business.  At the end I asked for any questions; after a long silence, the gentleman responsible for one of their most valuable legacy assets rose and asked, “so… how do we stop this?”

It was, admittedly, a challenging presentation.  But what was then speculation is now largely fact…  indeed, history.  And still, some things don’t change…

Further to “I was aiming for my foot, but I seem to have shot myself in the thigh…,”  WWD (nee Women’s Wear Daily…  the news is where one finds it) reports on a New Yorker panel discussion in New York last week:

BAD INTERNET: The panel was about the future of filmmaking, but that didn’t mean anyone had to like what they saw. “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet,” said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. “Period.”

At a breakfast cohosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and The New Yorker Thursday, Lynton wasn’t just trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”

Co-panelist Nora Ephron, who started her career in print, said the Internet has had a greater effect on “our beloved print than it’s had on the movie business.” But, she conceded, “We’re in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it….Stop it. I dare you.”

Lynton tried out another simile. Referring to the Obama administration’s goal to spread broadband access without, he said, regulating piracy, Lynton compared it with building highway systems without speed limits or driver’s licenses. “We do need rules of the road,” he said. (Lynton may not have liked Ephron’s chosen analogy for the way some people in the movie business are paid: “It’s a giant Ponzi scheme set up to compensate a few people at unbelievable rates,” she said, adding, “These people live like pashas. You cannot imagine the scale of wealth in Hollywood. People live like that here, but we live in apartments so you can’t see as much.”)…

(Emphasis, charmingly, WWD’s…)  The balance of the article is here.  For an ironic variation, see Techdirt for Sir Howard Stringer (Lynton’s boss) on how, had Sony forgone DRM, they “could have beaten Apple”: “Sony Says It Should Have Been More Open… But It Said That In 2005 Too.”

And for more on the general state of reaction to digital technology by incumbent media companies…  well, just Google “state of the newspaper industry,” “…music industry,” “…motion picture industry,” “…television industry”…

It’s easy to be empathetic with managers the very logics of whose businesses are being eroded by new technologies; change is tough, very tough.  But it’s harder to be be sympathetic with responses that are, in effect, nothing more than denial.  Emergent new technologies aren’t inherently good or bad; they just are.  It’s up to us, or at least to those who have some standing, to act in ways that can make that new tech good… good for consumers/users, good for companies and shareholders, good for society.

Easy to say; hard to do– I know.  But there are at least a few folks folks in the traditional media business trying to accomplish exactly this (see, e.g., “Yo, ho, ho…“).

Conversely, simply hoping that innovation won’t come, then hoping that it will go away, for sure isn’t a strategy to find that good…  Indeed– see here, here, and here– it’s not a strategy at all.