thoughts on computing

Carnage in the Making

Transformation of supply channels are never pretty – emotions and corporate carnage everywhere, a few new winners, and when all settles out eventually arrive at a more productive & efficient marketplace.

Since I spent much of the second half of last year writing my first book, as you can well imagine I’ve been paying particular interest to the morphing of all things publishing, with a particular focus on these things we have traditionally called “books” – will such a thing remain, how will they be distributed, how to construct them, and so on, all culminating into the ultimate question – how best to deliver something plenty of folks will actually find valuable?

This book was been done in what may soon be the (mostly) last vestiges of the old-school model, at least circa late 2009 / early 2010 – a traditional publisher (Wiley -who have been great to work with, by the way), a traditional distribution and retailing model (with Amazon playing a prominent, though by no means exclusive part of each of these two steps), and an expected ebook edition (by Amazon for the Kindle) four to six weeks after the paper book appears.

What is interesting is that in this model (pre-iPad, more on that in a moment) Amazon has a significant amount of control over the ebook distribution channel, and of course they have been working very hard to gain more. They really stepped up their pace recently, with presumably pre-emptive moves to sweeten the pot for authors and open up the Kindle for apps in the week+ before the iPad announcement.

Apple Enters the Fray

Nuke wants to announce his presence "with authority"

In a peculiarly ironic turn of events I received my “page proofs” (the near-final edition of a book, with just about final formatting, content, and so forth all in place for one last review) on the very day that Apple placed a big foot right in the middle of this fight, or as the infamous Nuke LaLoosh said in Bull Durham (my second favorite baseball movie), Apple “… announced their presence with authority”.

Amazon, of course neither had nor continued to stand still. In fact, they responded very forcefully by pulling all titles from Macmillan (a big publisher who is one of Apple’s launch partners), and going so far as to remove all references to these now-banned Macmillan titles from all Kindle users’ wish lists, in addition to removing sample chapters from these titles from all Kindles. That’s right, Amazon reached out and de-licensed, removed, whacked, destroyed – you pick the term – content that it had either agreed to maintain on a customer’s behalf or had previously delivered to that same customer.

Charles Stross (a well known science fiction author with some titles published by Tor, a Macmillan subsidiary) clearly describes the battlefield, the combatants, and what’s at stake in an excellent post – well worth the read.

As Stross points out

This whole mess is basically about duelling supply chain models.

…It’s interesting to note that unlike the music industry who had to be pushed, the big publishers seem to be willing to grab a passing lifeline.

… But Amazon, in declaring war on Macmillan in this underhand way, have screwed me, and I tend to take that personally, because they didn’t need to do that.

To his last point, Amazon (in this battle with Apple) really angered many content creators (in this case authors) … a losing proposition when one is in the business of distributing content.

In fact there was such an outcry that Amazon backed off (at least for now, more here) less than two days later.

But I think there is an even more important point here, one which has already been and will no doubt continue to underly many disputes as cloud computing continues its inexorable path towards dominance.

The Underlying Question of Trust
This point is very simple, really.

In their fight with MacMillan and Apple, Amazon crossed two boundaries with their customers that should never have been crossed.

In particular, they 1) deleted content that had already been delivered to the customer and 2) deleted content that they were storing for their customers (the wishlists). Hard to say which was worse (both were not good), but the wishlist content is something which Amazon encouraged customers to create and is also part of the customer experience, part of why someone would presumably intend to stay with Amazon and the Kindle for content.

Several observations:

• Amazon has been here before – remember the incident last summer when they deleted Orwell books? – and really should have learned their lesson.
• Irony of ironies, this sort of death-grip control is precisely why Apple has received so much criticism of the iPhone app store. Yet even when Apple has removed applications from the app store, I’m pretty sure that they did not have the temerity to remove apps that were already purchased by end customers.
• Even though these examples may be minor and may even be reversible, any time a provider breaks an implicit or explicit contract – no matter how minor, and particularly when this is a remote, seemingly abstract cloud provider – it is a very pointed reminder that the end customer is at the eternal whim of the provider, and most definitely is not in control.
• Customers do not like being reminded that they are not in control, and will gravitate towards service providers who understand this fact and behave accordingly.
• Deliberate removal of content is different, and arguably more toxic than inadvertent removal of content (as from operational or technical failures).

One last thought – once a reputation for capricious removal of a customer’s content (whether already delivered or ostensibly maintained on their behalf) is earned, it will be very, very, very hard to lose.

Bottom Line
I have no idea how this battle to establish the next dominant book distribution channel(s) will turn out, and truthfully have not even picked a favorite yet (others have opinions, of course).

What I do know, however, is that I – speaking as both a customer and a content creator – will drop any provider / channel-enabler who thinks that it is ok to break this boundary with customers, and am fairly certain that most customers will do the same.

How many occurrences will it take? Not sure, but we just don’t want to go there.

These are exciting times to be in both content creation and consumption. Many of these changes, while not seemingly directly “cloud computing”, both are enabled by and will drive much of the the near to mid term cloud computing adoption. As such, I will write on these topics from time to time.