Jon Alper's probably insufficiently humble opinion

I’ve had a number of jobs over the years where R&D was in my portfolio as support staff, a participant and a manager and I’ve worked, as an I.T. tech, in pure research facilities. I’ve learned something. Ship your research.

I worked as the hands-on I.T. guy for a now defunct medical devices company. The job was great. I was there while they grew from about thirty people to close to two hundred over the course of about two years. Until late in my tenure there, all the R&D was done in specific support of their flagship product. Whether it was on the accounting ledger as R&D I couldn’t tell you but thousands of staff hours were spent on researching everything from materials science, manufacturing practices and, of course the formal clinical trials of their products. Virtually every dollar spent on this R&D was driven by a product goal. Everything tested and experimented with during my first year there was being tested for use in the product line they actually intended to ship. Nobody was on the clock saying “I wonder if.”. If somebody had an idea, If it wasn’t vetted as having a potential commercial future, it didn’t get done. There was no ‘pure R&D’. That didn’t mean some ideas didn’t get very far along before they died. I remember every man and woman in the company being brought into a room to feel plastic breasts. We went in, we were asked “does this feel real”. A few weeks later we were asked “Can you find a lump?”. The goal was a training simulator for breast examination. As I recall, and I could be wrong, the conclusion they came to was that the stimulants of breast tissue, skin and lumps couldn’t be made meaningfully enough realistic to make it safe to teach to ignore what to feel as case to for concern and what to feel as normal variation. The project was summarily killed and the staff back on in process projects without any kind of merciful pause or mourning period. It was a dead end quickly.

I worked for another company that was ultimately sold to a very large company you’ve surely heard of. I got supremely lucky in my brief tenure there. I arrived at the worst possible time to actually achieve any of what I hoped to when first took the job but the President and CEO were extremely honorable and generous with me despite the chaos that began a week after I arrived. Frankly, I seriously lucked out. It was immediately scary within mere days of my hire but that panic ultimately evolved into the sale to ‘unnamed huge company’ and most of the engineering team went on to jobs there and do major work, on the other side of the country. That company, the one sold, began life as a firm doing very academic R&D funded in large part by SBIR grants doing work for NASA. Things even now not yet, as far as I know, deployed by NASA. The things they built, the prototypes done as R&D were shockingly cool things. Things I still, more than a decade later, haven’t seen make it into mainstream products. The brilliance in what they built is impossible to articulate. These people, from the founder on down were shockingly smart. They built controllers for telepresence and simulations that included touch feedback. Now, we’ve all felt a gun in a console game that jumps in your hand when fired. A steering wheel that rumbles when the virtual car runs over a bumpy patch on the pixel track. Imagine touch feedback so nuanced, so elegantly implemented that you could feel the shape of a virtual space you couldn’t see while walking through it with a joystick. Imagine feedback so nuanced you could draw the shape of a virtual maze based only on what you felt from the joystick. Imagine touch feedback so good that if you used it on a steering wheel in a game, it made you able to drive the car closer to its limits and complete laps faster. The steering of my real car is ‘drive by wire’ more than fifteen years later and it gives me less useful feedback than those prototypes. The R&D that built the prototypes was R&D with a purpose but it wasn’t R&D that was ever intended to end up in anything like the test form in a final product. They weren’t rough drafts, they were proofs of concept to learn from. None of that work was ultimately visible as more than a faint glimmer in the final shipping products. No fault on anyone there, the costs involved and target market of the final products not only precluded it but actually might have made the product inferior.

Before both and after both of these jobs, I’ve been employed as and a consultant to pure academic research facilities mostly in biotech. Academic research is, and should be, a completely different ball game. It’s not technology R&D, it’s science. There are critical differences there. The purpose of science is discovery. Pure, simple, discovery. Sure, maybe it will lead to a new medication, a new procedure or a business opportunity but that isn’t, and can’t be, the purpose. The purpose is “Let’s build a test to see how this works”. You don’t, for example, send the Voyager space probes to invent a product. You do it because we, as a species, need to learn. Of course, there will usually be technology innovations created in support of the research that could lead to business opportunity but the purpose of the work is pure learning. Cancer research may lead to cancer cures. Pure academic metabolic research might also. You have to invest in basic research on cellular metabolism whether or not you’re studying cancer. The current climate of public derision in the press for research that seems to have no probable useful purpose is bad for society. Research, pure research done with scientific rigor is vital for its own sake. Science is enormously important. Our society is investing less and less in true science and that’s deeply disturbing. It is important to remember though that R&D is not science even if we seek to apply scientific rigor.

Finally, I’ve worked on  a lot of new media jobs. All these experiences above taught me this. When you’re doing R&D in a commercial tech company? Ship your research. I don’t mean literally take an idea all the way to a product you sell. I mean treat it like everything will be or will be used for shipping products.

If you want to explore a technical idea, an innovation, invest in it when you think can actually use it. Don’t expend your core resources just fiddling around. Find a business goal you think your idea can support and find a way to make the project fund the research or the research fund another business goal. So, for example, let’s say you want to experiment with a new CMS, find a project that needs the functionality you want to explore. Do structured tests to see if what you want to be true stands a decent chance of being true. Set break points to check your thinking and set about actually doing work with the experimental notion with the idea you plan to ship it. Don’t fund the research out of R&D, fund it out of an actual project. Do the research with the same level of rigor you’d bring to production methods you already know and use. You will, I hope, fail miserably regularly. Failure is the cornerstone of innovation. You have to be prepared to throw an idea away that’s clearly not going to work.

The thing is though, if you don’t treat your R&D with the same level of rigor you would if it was sure to actually ship, you’ll learn nothing. You’ll never stress test the idea. If it’s a new software tool, you’ll never test the vendors support services. If it’s a new version of a tool you already use, you’ll never put it through the mundane day to day processes you’ll have to when you’re actually doing production work.

The worst mistakes, the most disastrous  dead ends, the most massive cost over-runs and delays were almost always something you could trace back to a decision that went like this: “We’ve spent a few weeks looking at this tool and reading up and we want to invest in this tool.” Investment in a tool is sometimes just training and time. Sometimes it’s millions on expensive hardware. All of these messes arose from somebody thinking the technology itself could do magic. People do magic, technology doesn’t. Only applying the same level of self criticism and doubt to your ‘experiments’ as your customers will to your products can you make efficient use of your research.

A concrete example should make this clear:  If you make television shows and you want to try a new editing system (NLE), deploy one and use it. Now, testing a new new NLE may not seem like R&D but it is. It’s what needs to be done to stay at the cutting edge in the video production business. First, use it to produce an internal project. A real project with stakeholders and somebody other than you setting expectations for turnaround time and quality; an internal presentation reel for example. Remember though, don’t cut something that nobody cares about. Cut something that somebody outside the testing group cares about. Something underfunded but low stakes. Use the R&D budget to make a skilled editor available to this project. Use the R&D budget to rent this much desired new system for the important internal project that couldn’t otherwise afford it. Pick something gnarly. Something with footage from disparate sources. Something that relies on your motion graphics group to make assets for. Pick something with a picky stakeholder who will make you make a pile of annoying last minute changes. In the middle of the project? Break the NLE. No, I don’t mean spill coffee into it, but I do mean break it. Install something you shouldn’t. Disconnect the media drive in the middle of a render. Delete some obscure application file and call for support. See how it will be when there’s an air date on the line. If your internal project survives all this. If your experienced editor comfortably adapts to the tool. If they like the tool. You’ve given your senior staff a chance to play with a new tool. They get professional and personal development. Your ‘no paying client’ internal project that was important enough to fund got done with the money set aside for R&D. Your test of the new tool stress tested it.

Next step. Use the new NLE on an actual project. Not one for a client but one that’s complete. One you’ve already shipped that you’re proud of. Assign a junior editor and producer to re-make something that’s already been done from the carefully archived materials for a finished project. Then you’ll test your NLE with a real volume of footage. The previous finished product is the benchmark for the re-make. Everything from lower thirds, to effects to closed captioning gets put through the workflow with the new NLE.

If the new NLE lives through this test, you’ve really stress tested it. You’ve reduced your business risk in deciding to deploy it on paying projects and you’ve done these tests with enough different people involved you can make your choices based on feedback from the people, your people, that will need to rely on the tool. You didn’t just read an article and say “it’s the latest thing we have to use it”.

You’ll have tested your archiving compliance. You’ll have given your senior staff a chance to participate in a strategic choice. You’ll have given your junior staff to learn new things and get their hands on playing with a flagship project.. They’ll learn from how their more experienced colleagues work. You’ll have a low risk letting these junior staff try things and see how they perform.

You’ll get to see how the NLE that survived the stresses of making a five minute internal demo reel. If the new NLE survives that test? Then you deploy in a relatively low stakes project in production. It’s R&D research and development. You researched the viability of the tool and you developed the internal resources to deploy it. Even if it turns out to be badly supported overpriced junk you’d never buy in any volume, you’ve spent your R&D money well.

R&D in I.T. and New Media Production is about testing new tools, new workflows, new ways of capturing, organizing and presenting information. Your time and money should be spent moving to scenarios where you’re actually testing the ideas in real-world scenarios while managing risk. Maybe it’s a new visual metaphor. Prototype it and get it in front of real users not your staff and do it in a structured and objective way. Go in hoping it will crash and burn as much as you’re hoping it will be a breakthrough. If you’re not, very quickly, imposing discipline on your process you’re wasting money and putting your business at risk.

I have owned Acura cars for twenty-some years now. The first, a first generation Integra, the second, a third gen Integra and now a TSX. There are some concrete tangible reasons I’ve chosen them and some admittedly silly ‘branding victim’ reasons.

The concrete reasons:

• They are reliable resale-value-holding japanese cars. Say what you like but, bottom line, Japanese cars are simply more reliable on average. Remember, not saying only Japanese built, most japanese cars for sale in the US are made in the US by American union workers just japanese as opposed to American, Korean, German or Swedish cars. I can’t afford Italian ones and if I could, reliability wouldn’t be my first concern. (As it happens, quirks of Honda’s business have meant all of my Acuras have been built in Japan but the point is, it’s not the labor that has made Japanese cars more reliable in general over the last twenty-some years than the comparable alternatives.)
• They are comparatively safe cars.
• They offered real, as in has a clutch, manual transmissions.
• They have high revving four bangers. They’ve all had, to a declining extent as they’ve been revised, peaks in the power curve toward the higher end of the rev range make them fun to drive for me. What others have seen as a flaw, that you have to wind them all the way out before you shift, is my idea of a grand old time. The little buggers feel fast even when I’m behaving myself and are fast when, long ago before the statute of limitations ran out, I wasn’t.
• They’ve been smallish. Not tiny but at the small end for my needs. I like a smaller car. As I’ve grown older, my desire for comfort has moved me toward larger and and now to a four door sedan, but I still prefer to be on the smaller end.
• The models I have chosen have been toward the higher fuel efficiency and low emissions end of the spectrum. No, they aren’t the best you can get, but all things in life include compromise.
• The Honda equivalents of the models I’ve chosen don’t exist in the US or I’d have just as happily saved the money and given up the branding.

Then there’s the brand victim stuff.

• I like the marketing personality of the Acura brand. I won’t deny it. I like the logo, the type face and the “luxury car for the smart cheap bastard” placement in the automotive branding food chain.
• I like, mostly, the aesthetics of the cars. Excess grill and excess chrome and too many damned curves is a blight on the current models but, relative to the brutalization of classic lines recent BMW’s embody, I prefer the Acuras. (the 318 is kinda the exception in the range of remotely affordable bimmers but even that has suffered some aesthetically in the recent changes to the BMW look.)
• My dealer, Acura of Boston, has never screwed me or jerked me around.
• They do a minimum of things that piss me off. They don’t have a ‘track me everywhere’ OnStar system. They don’t make it hard for me to change my own oil or do other basic maintenance myself. (Yes, I do occasionally do these things and I like knowing I could.)
• They don’t have so many byzantine over complicated choices to make that your Subaru $25,500 WRX cost $41.500 by the time it’s an STi Limited with the same basic features as the TSX I bought for much less. (yes, I know, different class and type of car but still, go play on the web sites and remember, the WRX was on the short list of other cars I considered when I bought my TSX. It was a missed win for Subaru.).
• They, Hondas and Acuras in general, have good user interfaces. Switches, knobs and buttons are usually where they belong and behave as they should.

Now, all of these aren’t accidental choices. Honda decided they want guys like me for a customer and they’ve made some good choices to pry my money out of my wallet. I have been successfully manipulated err.. marketed to by Honda.

So that’s plenty of ‘setup’. What’s the missed opportunity? They, after more than 20 years of me owning their products in a context that they know I own them, they should have figured out how to make incremental money off me.

They have never failed to accurately remind me to go in for a service or mention my current car when they try to sell me a new one. They just don’t know how to wring out every dollar from me they could.

Hell, they haven’t even figured out that they could have sold me my wife’s last two cars too. Those have been Honda that could have been bought used from an affiliated dealer.

Now, consider that I have helped them sell, as in walked in with a customer to the dealer, two other Acuras and, via “go look at this car” one more.  This is the dealer and the manufacturer. Both should know me as a customer. Both should find a way to reward me for my evangelism.

The dealer doesn’t get all my service work. I do about 50% of my services at Hondaa King over the life of a car because Hondaa King is often more affordable and always reliable for me. Now, I really like the Hondaa King guys, and I’d still throw business their way no matter what but, if I didn’t have them? Acura Of Boston, who I also like, would still not get all my work. They just don’t deliver the “your sorted” feeling their prices and luxury should. Nikon has done a great job of making me feel that “you’re sorted, we gotcha” sensation when I’ve had them service my gear. Why can’t my car company?

They just don’t seem to make an effort to know me. They don’t say, as Hondaa King has “Jon, don’t be an idiot, don’t spend the money on this fix now. Live with it for 3 months, it will be cheaper when you do it at the next service.” That my quirky personality means I actually like somebody I trust telling me, in those words, ‘don’t be an idiot’ is part of the point. Hondaa King knows me. The Acura service guys don’t and they don’t try to. They do, however, retain staff for years so that’s not the problem.

Then they don’t sell me ‘stuff’. A car is, for me anyway, a typically ten year purchase. Want to make more money? Sell me things over the life the car that will keep me spending money on your product and aware of your brand. That means, after 2 years, sell me the big wheels and summer tieres at a reasonable price, a TireRack price. Don’t make it utterly stupid not to look to my awesome body shop guy for a deal. (no real URL for them) for a MUCH better deal. Sell me actually meaningful feature upgrades for my Nav system not just new map disks. Sell me killer detailing services that make the car feel new again. (yes they do detailing work but hardly the quality they could). They don’t sell me. market to me silly little wear parts like floor mats, lamp upgrades or other dumb little affordable things that could make me feel good about a purchase and earn them money during the whole life of the product.

What do they do instead? They have, a year later, started trying to sell me a new car. If they kept selling me my old one, they could be damned sure I’d buy a new one when I was ready.

How does this apply, this way of looking at the world apply to other products like, oh, say, the iOS and Mac app stores?

Start here, read this, then come on back: http://embargowatch.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/why-do-blog-on-embargoes/

Ok? Back? Good.. here we go.

So, I’m not a journalist. I did take some journalism classes nearly three decades ago in college. Damned if I remember what I learned in class and what I learned since. Such is the nature of life experience. I’ve even been paid as a journalist and, more specifically as a tech writer. Never been my profession but, guess what, I have an opinion anyway. Shocking ain’t it?

Embargoes are a deliberate collusion between the subject of the story and the person whose job it is to tell the story. Now, as the link above explains, it can be a useful collusion. I submit, not useful enough to justify. It’s not just science journalism, by a long shot, where these embargoes occur. Embargoes also happen, a lot, in the tech journalism business.  A reporter will be given to product information prior to release on condition they don’t publish before a certain time or event.

In the case of tech journalism, so goes the theory, the story about the new Fronzilator 5000 will be deeper and more informative to the potential customer base if the press has had a chance to preview the “next big thing” and can get a story with meat on its bones out quickly and not just regurgitate the press release or be wrong in the facts. A  Fronzilator 5000 reported as having only 16GB of Flash Memory when, in fact it has 16 Yottabytes would make the $199 price point less of a breakthrough. Widgetcorp can’t have that so they give out advanced info and embargo it until they’re ready to announce the product.

Here’s the real deal though, the notion of a press embargo is inherently flawed because of the collusion and the costs outweigh the benefits. The press is supposed to be in an at least somewhat adversarial relationship with the subjects of their stories.  It’s a journalist’s job to uncover and disseminate the truth as best they can.

A MacMouser Magazine writer is put at a competitive disadvantage if she doesn’t get embargoed information that a reporter from The New Paltz Times does. Boom, conflict of interest. The guy with early access won’t risk losing it by breaching the embargo. If he discovers the Fronzilator 5000’s 16 yottabytes of Flash is only accessible during months ending in Y, he won’t break that story before the embargo and he probably won’t make it the lead of his first published story after the announcement. He won’t, he can’t risk losing his early access,. Besides, at two hundred bucks for 16 Yottabytes, that little problem isn’t that big a deal really. Is it?

What about when he learns the manufacturing breakthrough that allowed the costs to be that low involved kitten livers?

What happens when Doodadtech, the startup, has a new product and they’d kill for any press coverage they can get. The same journalist who worried about their access to the stuff from the much more powerful Widgetcorp has no similar fears of harming the marketability of the Doodadtech Garbonzotron and will, as she should, point out that the Garbonzotron isn’t a mature product. They will, being able writers, try to tell the fullest story they can because doing so is all good for them professionally.  Despite the fact that the Widgetcorp Garbonzotron is a wireless mouse that needs no batteries is made entirely of recycled newsprint and costs 27 cents retail, ir misses sending every 9th mouse click on Tuesdays. The good journalist has to tell the whole story. The emphasis will surely be on the thing only a trained tech journalist will notice because that’s their job. Help inform their audience.

Doodadtech’s environmentally friendly wireless mouse dies in the market from bad press and Doodadtech folds. Widgetcorp makes even more money and, 3 years later, 9 months after the Fronzilator 5000’s actual ship date, they fix the bug to great praise in the press. The kitten liver issue is, of course, forgotten.

All mythical and disturbing examples aside, the concern is that there is a force that inherently aligns the interests of the journalist with his (or her) subjects: access. This alignment of interests denies you, the readers, unbiased coverage. This isn’t even malicious or ‘agenda’ driven bias. It’s pernicious.

So, as you read the coverage of any issue, do a little digging, think a bit about why it seems the guy on CNN softballs the questions, who appears on which shows, who takes whose calls.

All that’s obvious of course. You knew all that, so, why did I write this? WikiLeaks.

Are there serious issues with the whos, whats, whys and hows? Oh yeah. Are there all sorts of moral complexities involved? You betcha!

In the end though, do we have enough of an adversarial press willing and able to bring out Truth? In the absence of a trained, careful, professional press willing and able to really dig into their subjects are things like WikiLeaks inevitable and, unfortunately, necessary?

We need to demand better from the press we pay for . We do, all of us, pay for the journalism we get. Shall we try to get more for our money?