Digital Media Again

Tags

digitqal media, DVDs, HBR, market, movies, releases, technology

Today I have read the following article in Harvard Business Review (can be found here) and again, with disappointment, I have to say that the Digital Media market seems to be trying to save themselves through rehashing old strategies, not through inventing new ones. The article presents an idea which can limit losses – namely it proposes to release DVDs and other electronic media quicker (shrink time window between lets say movie release in theatres and its release on DVD) – but it cannot completely do away with them. Following proposed path will consequently lead to some losses on movie ticket sales (a high margin market), but it should limit piracy, as many people go that route not wanting to wait too long for legal copy of the movie or book (increasing sales of the latter, a low margin market). Lose some, win some.

The idea does nothing to protect music released on CDs though (or even as download), as those are immediately being re-released on the black market in form of digital copies. The same will happen if movies will have different release dates internationally – internet is quicker than distributors.

I am still convinced that digital age needs completely new approach. Stringent and strong laws may help, but will not remove the problem. We need to find a balance between modern, completely new ways of selling and distributing digital content and related copyright protection laws. A balance which will allow markets to flourish, without stifling them and without making us suffer too much (through inference of state in our lives, for example). We need a revolution, not an evolution.

Impressions of Barcelona – Mercat de Sant Josep

Tags

Barcelona, la Rambla, market, Sant Josep

Wandering down la Rambla during my recent trip to Barcelona I found (like many tourists before me) this market… Its colours are a feast for the eyes… here are some images from there:

Vanishing Jobs? Not really…

Tags

Charles Handy, crisis, education, job market, jobs, knowledge worker, market, specialisation

Twenty years ago Mr. Charles Handy wrote a book about change and in it he used some of the data published some years before his book came out. One of this data listed statistics about education of young people in 1988. In that OECD stats Great Britain placed 16th in the “…league table of young people in education after 16 years of age – above only Portugal and Spain.” (C. Handy, “The Age of Unreason” p. 29, Arrow Books, 1991). Now fast forward to today and see where the Britain, Spain and Portugal are economically. I wonder how Greece fared in those same statistics.

In one of my previous posts I said that jobs are out there, we just have to find them, as they are different to those we are (or were) used to. In the age of knowledge worker of Mr. Drucker, people need to have proper knowledge in order to participate in the job market. They need to be educated in right disciplines plus they must have human properties making them suitable for service jobs. If you will greatly simplify, you can cut the job market into those major categories: scientists and their helpers (those are people coming up with things); producers (including farmers and all workers producing things for us such as candy, bread, cars and airplanes); administration (all governmental jobs including Mr. President) and service sector. All of those have changed not only in their relative size – more percentage of people work in service then in all of them combined now – but also in demand all those jobs place on our intelligence, skills and training. That is why people who have chosen wrong subject of their studies years ago are now without work. In other words, you may be a master in coal excavation, but no one will employ you. Or you may be a bachelor in software development and you will get only a medium wage boring job, because there is a lot people like you out there.

It also so happens that jobs which are available demand high specialisation and great level of education, which (without offending anyone’s intelligence) not many of us can achieve. That is why there are a lot of educated people without work, and there is work available without people qualified enough to take it. That is one side of it. The other is that some of the people in positions of power given to them by their skills, jobs and ability, can abuse that power for their own gains. They can come up with schemes lesser people will not understand well enough to be able to stop them. Look at the crisis from few years ago and complicated financial instruments which were devised and abused by few, but not understood by many.

The third consequence is that whenever a financial crisis happens, we are so affected by it – service jobs are the first to get hurt, as people normally spending their income to get the service spend less because of the crisis. That starts a deadly spiral, and we all get hurt a lot more than it was the case when majority of the jobs were in manufacturing.

All I wrote above is not new. Ideas are coming from the book written 20 years ago, but as usual, no one listened. We know why things happen, but no one told us what to do about it. I don’t believe any great writer or thinker can change the way things are right now, no matter how right and revolutionary his ideas are going to be. For me, a non-economist, non-specialist person, obvious thing to do is that we need to keep the demand for services high. Secondly, we need to make sure that service providers are quick enough in adaptation, as services demanded today may be not needed tomorrow because of many reasons. Therefore education should go towards teaching not one, but a few skills including quick adaptation. Having enough of those skills could give us a cushion to fall onto in case of problems in our main area of specialisation. In other words, we would need to replace the age of specialisation with age of multi-specialisation. I have no idea if that would solve our problems, but here I count on scientists and their helpers – at least those ones with proper set of values.

Where Are the Jobs?

Tags

crisis, jobs, market

I have just now read an article here: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2011/08/05/the-jobless-future/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+buzzmachine+%28BuzzMachine%29&utm_content=Twitter suggested by Twitter. As far as I do agree that times are changing, I do not agree that jobs will not come back.

I think they will, but different.

It is true that retailing has been changed by Amazon and that paper journalism has been almost rendered obsolete by internet. In all areas of life 21st century showed us change: electronics, postal services, manufacturing, travel, medicine, genetics, family, psychology, construction, social sciences… Wherever you look, it is no longer as it once was. Behind all that change there are people, not machines. Without ideas of those people we would not be where we are now. But after all, Amazon is nothing else but a store without the door or physical location. Post office still has to deliver manually packages ordered online – we are not sending many letters lately, but we still generate postal traffic.

We still like physically touch goods we buy, especially groceries. We still like to put on clothes we will eventually wear. There is no store in world-wide web which can get my size just perfect and sending those shoes or clothes back and forth is simply annoying.

I think that this uniformity will eventually become boring if it not already has. People will look for exclusivity. We will want to wear custom-made dresses, suits, shoes… We will want to have custom-made furniture. Pictures hanging on our walls should have some relation to us, not be one of the million copies sold in Ikea. This area – relatively cheap customisation, differentiation of products – definitely requires more people. Carpenters, designers, painters, builders, photographers…It requires different skills or education, but definitely requires people.

The second solution is more difficult: we should, same way as Jeff Bezos did, look at the whole picture and ask what is missing here. Find a different approach to jobs. We don’t always have to be clerks in stores, but we may become personal advisers. Today many people use physical stores to check hardware (picture or sound quality etc) before they will buy it from the net. Where will all those people go if all those stores will disappear? Maybe creating small show rooms full of newest stuff, manned by knowledgeable advisers, is an idea? And how about cosmetics – would you buy a newest perfume just because of its picture?

I am convinced that there are jobs out there, we just have not discovered them yet. We are simply stuck in traditional way of thinking about jobs, where reality already has overtaken us. We need to catch up, quickly.