When I got home on Friday evening, I found out that the day's Countdown program was the last and that Keith Olbermann was leaving MSNBC. I was so surprised, so incredulous, that I did a quick scan through the various news sites to confirm the story. Over the course of the surrounding weekend, there wasn't much in terms of details or explanations. And while this may not be a big story for some, I personally feel a sense of loss and can't shake the sense that it stands as a significant milestone in cultural history -- maybe not "the day the music died", but certainly the symbolic end to something much larger than the show itself.
Organizations in Transition
When it comes to the what and why of the end of Olbermann's relationship with NBC, most of what's being published right now tends to focus on a history of trouble between Olbermann and NBC management. The spin coming through many of these stories suggest that the events weren't connected to the Comcast merger and that Comcast had no role in the events. One piece that I read even suggested that Friday's events had been months in the making. However, even a casual business observer will note the lack of an elegant transition, a winding down like someone giving two weeks notice or a retiring. This didn't happen with message planning and a gradual release. And while I wasn't watching MSNBC on Friday night, my understanding is that the channel was still broadcasting Olbermann promo commercials after the announcement of the last show.
Clearly, whatever took place in New York on Friday, it was more explosion than scripted event and the surrounding events have been efforts at messaging damage control. If you play out the various possible scenarios, it's hard to imagine a viable one where NBC wanted to keep Olbermann on the air -- unlike most employer/employee relationships, broadcasters have much broader flexibility in how they define their relationships. If this had simply been Keith upset, they could have continued to run Countdown with a guest host while trying to work through a cool down period. If there was any bridge left, they could have brought him in occasionally for special events or commentary.
A Deeper Cultural Loss
We lost more than a political voice with the end of this show. To get to the heart of this, you have to peel back a few layers, dig down beneath partisan political rhetoric, the left and the right, and the theater of the term "wing". At the heart of the Countdown concept was a news show that riffed on the the traditional structure and tone with a unique, playful intelligence. Take the concept of counting down the top five news stories, something more akin to an MTV or VH1 video program. Traditional news programs always lead with the top story and work their way down a closing light moment like waterskiing squirrels.
Olbermann also brought a unique cultural intelligence to the television news role. Equally at home quoting from classical literature or sports history, Olbermann used using a wide range of cultural references to bring verbal flourish to the world of Yet Another news story. Instead of reducing things to the lowest common denominator, he elevated the common denominator, bridging low and high brow. In the same way that a typical Sports Center viewer had a deep awareness of the history of sport and a high sports IQ, Olbermann's Countdown assumed its audience was intelligent and that the show wasn't their only source of content. Instead of Yet Another politics or news show, Olbermann made the show feel more like getting an update on the news from one of your friends -- one who was just as likely to be irreverent as serious.
And while I would love to use specific examples of broadcast moments where Keith was so much better than so many broadcasters, it's hard to present good examples without starting a partisan back-and-forth. While I might find places where Olbermann dug deeper, understood the bigger story and continued to question a story, someone with a right-wing, anti-Olbermann bias might call him badgering or worse.
Much has been made of the politics surrounding Keith Olbermann. There has also been a lot of speculation surrounding Comcast management's political interests and how that may affect content. In some of the left-right comparisons, MSNBC is often painted as the counter to Fox News, representing a left-leaning political spin. I think that Jon Stewart's assessment of MSNBC as hopelessly muddled is probably a more accurate analysis.
But regardless, one of the messaging points that keeps surfacing is this idea that MSNBC is maintaining their commitment to liberal voices through Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, and Ed Schultz. This is one of those great examples of trying to promote messaging that supports an image that simply doesn't match your actions. Going down a list, from the cancellation of Phil Donahue's show through the network's back and forth with David Schuster and it's well-publicized ongoing conflicts with Olbermann, NBC has repeatedly acted in ways that suggest no commitment to any sort of left-wing or liberal messaging. At best, their support seems to be a limited tolerance, driven by a general recognition that "liberal" content provides them some measurable level of audience and some base level of product differentiation. I suspect that within the internal ranks of the NBC organization, those that still speak with any sort of liberal know that there is a limit on NBC's tolerance of their voice.
Comcast? NBC? Does it Really Matter?
We may never know whether this was personal politics, corporate politics, or just business. The events don't smell like the moves of the Food Network, putting all of their old chef-stars out to pasture so that they can replace them with branded celebrities that Food Network owns the marketing rights for. Instead, this feels more like that first power-play in the content carrier revolution, when the newly crowned Comcast-NBC merger states emphatically, "whatever, I do what I want!"
As long as the government continues to approve of mergers like the Comcast-NBC deal, as more and more of our emerging communications platforms get wrapped up in consolidated ownership of content, distribution, and infrastructure, and as long as we continue to tolerate politically active corporate entities like Clear Channel, News Corp., and Comcast controlling huge chunks of our communications infrastructure, we'll see the lines between politics and business messaging erode any existing framework of open communication.
Olbermann's New Show
But if you have any doubts about what was behind all of this, the news came through that Olbermann will be getting a new show on Al Gore's Current TV. Like me, you'll probably have to jump through a few hoops to find the channel listing and see if your local version of Comcast even carries the channel.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
If Google Posts a Job Opening, Does it Really Count as a Job Opportunity?
We've all heard about Google's exclusive hiring practices and how they go through extraordinary efforts to hire what they consider only the most exceptional candidates. So it struck me the other day as I waded through a LinkedIn job search where where the first two or three pages of results were Google listings, if Google posts a job opening, does it really count as a job opportunity?
Consider this recent news from Google, Google gets 75,000 job apps in a week - for 6000 openings. That works out to about 1200 applicants per job. While you could look at this from a lot of angles -- hiring on internet scale, the compelling value of Google's work environment strategy, or even the real sucktacular nature of the economy -- let's think about how many of those 1200 people actually have a shot at that job. While you could argue that 1 in 1200 is a lot better odds than you have for winning the lottery, your odds of winning the lottery are simple probability. For those 1200 individuals, there are factors for qualification, differentiation, and probably a bunch of invisible, unspoken ones as well. For many of those 1200 applicants, the odds of winning the Google job lottery is actually zero.
Is a Google Job Listing the Equivalent of Spam?
Out of that group of 1200 people applying for an opening at Google, my guess is that there is probably a list of preferred candidates drawn from employee recommendations or other more direct submissions. But let's assume for a minute that the process is open. Following on the themes that I talked about in one of my Please Hire Me posts, how do you differentiate yourself in a pool of over 1200 people? Imagine a person reading 250 resumes per day for per position with a constant stream of new resumes coming in all of the time -- and that's just reading them, not following up, etc. If you think about that kind of scale, at best you're looking at an algorithmic scan of them all. At worst, you're looking at a giant pool of resumes that are simply ignored.
Think about what that means in terms of timing for when you submit you're resume. In the old days, you might have a week or two to position yourself, customize your resume, and focus your cover letter. If you're submitting to a position at Google, all that time you spent has just put you in the back of a chronological line 1200 people deep -- 1200 people whose 15 or so skills listed as requirements also match the position.
Finding the Deeper Meaning in Google's Applicant Volume
If you think about that pool of 1200 or so candidates and the difficulty of filtering that pool, you might start to wonder whether that type of process would yield a top-tier, unique candidate. Or even the most qualified. So, if you can't find the perfect drop of water when you're looking at the lake, why would you use a process that created so much water? What if the purpose of having so many candidates isn't to look at the candidates, but rather to provide statistical data that supports the idea that you looked at lots of people before you selected the candidate that you chose? The question is, are those 75000 resumes really about 75000 candidates or simply better justification for the 6000 that Google does choose, assuming that they fill each position from the pool that was generated that week. What about the candidates that they target and recruit, like from Apple or Microsoft?
The funny thing about all of this is that many job search sites (like Linked In) include check boxes so that you can just search listings from a specific company. When you look at the numbers, perhaps what they need is support for exclusion filters or Boolean search terms like, "not Google".
UPDATE: I did a some research and experimentation using the Linked In search function. It turns out that there is Boolean support in Advanced Search. You can use AND, OR, or NOT, but they have to be in capital letters. While I was able to make this work in the Keyword search field, the company field doesn't appear to support Boolean search. So, if you want to filter Google out of your search results, you can add NOT google to the Keywords search, but you also risk filtering out jobs that might include Google as part of a skill or a capability.
Consider this recent news from Google, Google gets 75,000 job apps in a week - for 6000 openings. That works out to about 1200 applicants per job. While you could look at this from a lot of angles -- hiring on internet scale, the compelling value of Google's work environment strategy, or even the real sucktacular nature of the economy -- let's think about how many of those 1200 people actually have a shot at that job. While you could argue that 1 in 1200 is a lot better odds than you have for winning the lottery, your odds of winning the lottery are simple probability. For those 1200 individuals, there are factors for qualification, differentiation, and probably a bunch of invisible, unspoken ones as well. For many of those 1200 applicants, the odds of winning the Google job lottery is actually zero.
Is a Google Job Listing the Equivalent of Spam?
Out of that group of 1200 people applying for an opening at Google, my guess is that there is probably a list of preferred candidates drawn from employee recommendations or other more direct submissions. But let's assume for a minute that the process is open. Following on the themes that I talked about in one of my Please Hire Me posts, how do you differentiate yourself in a pool of over 1200 people? Imagine a person reading 250 resumes per day for per position with a constant stream of new resumes coming in all of the time -- and that's just reading them, not following up, etc. If you think about that kind of scale, at best you're looking at an algorithmic scan of them all. At worst, you're looking at a giant pool of resumes that are simply ignored.
Think about what that means in terms of timing for when you submit you're resume. In the old days, you might have a week or two to position yourself, customize your resume, and focus your cover letter. If you're submitting to a position at Google, all that time you spent has just put you in the back of a chronological line 1200 people deep -- 1200 people whose 15 or so skills listed as requirements also match the position.
Finding the Deeper Meaning in Google's Applicant Volume
If you think about that pool of 1200 or so candidates and the difficulty of filtering that pool, you might start to wonder whether that type of process would yield a top-tier, unique candidate. Or even the most qualified. So, if you can't find the perfect drop of water when you're looking at the lake, why would you use a process that created so much water? What if the purpose of having so many candidates isn't to look at the candidates, but rather to provide statistical data that supports the idea that you looked at lots of people before you selected the candidate that you chose? The question is, are those 75000 resumes really about 75000 candidates or simply better justification for the 6000 that Google does choose, assuming that they fill each position from the pool that was generated that week. What about the candidates that they target and recruit, like from Apple or Microsoft?
The funny thing about all of this is that many job search sites (like Linked In) include check boxes so that you can just search listings from a specific company. When you look at the numbers, perhaps what they need is support for exclusion filters or Boolean search terms like, "not Google".
UPDATE: I did a some research and experimentation using the Linked In search function. It turns out that there is Boolean support in Advanced Search. You can use AND, OR, or NOT, but they have to be in capital letters. While I was able to make this work in the Keyword search field, the company field doesn't appear to support Boolean search. So, if you want to filter Google out of your search results, you can add NOT google to the Keywords search, but you also risk filtering out jobs that might include Google as part of a skill or a capability.
Monday, January 31, 2011
How Does Your Broadband Provider's Performance Rank
One of the great frustrations in getting broadband service is that what you're sold and what you pay for is not always equal to what you're being delivered. While the carriers are quick to promote download speeds, the actual bandwidth performance that you get is often tucked neatly under the umbrella of caveats like "speeds up-to". Meanwhile, using bandwidth management and oversubscription, they deliver connected bandwidth far below their published maximum values.
While most of us are aware of these carrier practices (or rather, we know that sometimes our broadband doesn't seem as fast, even if we don't know what the cause is), the sad truth is that we haven't really had access to tools that enable us to accurately measure there performance beyond basic speed test sites and anecdotal tales on bulletin boards like you find on DSLReports. As a consumer, this makes it hard for you to competitively shop. Add to that the hassles of switching, and you often find yourself at the mercy of a very limited market. But what if you knew which ISPs delivered the best, most reliable bandwidth?
Fallout in the war for Net Neutrality
Late last year you may have picked up on a story about a disagreement between Comcast and Level3 -- or Comcast and Netflix, depending upon how you look at it. Essentially, Comcast noticed that every evening their network traffic ramps up as many of their customers grab their computers, their iPads or their Netflix-enabled Blue Ray players and begin streaming movies from Netflix. Since Comcast would prefer to stream their own digital content that they can charge for, they decided that Level3/Netflix should be forced to pay additional charges to deliver all of that Netflix content. And another battle over the issues of Net Neutrality started.
Recently, Netflix fired back. In this post on the Netflix tech blog, Netflix Performance on Top ISP Networks, Netflix documents the streaming performance of many US and Canadian ISPs. With the volume of streaming media that Netflix has been serving, they have been able to learn a lot about network performance and sustained content throughput. According to Netflix, when they stream an HD video, the ideal amount of bandwidth needed for optimal quality would be 4800 Kbits/second (4.8 Mbits /second). Based on their graphs, none of the ISPs are delivering sustained throughput at that level.
Finding the Take-away
You can look at this post from a lot of different angles and find a lot of meaning. If you're looking to argue from the side of an ISP or a carrier, you'll find comments on the lack of differentiation between services (or potentially levels of service) in averaging provider performance. You'll also find infrastructure costing and service level analogies that point to why Netflix streaming is such a bandwidth hog and how that hurts other users on the ISPs network. And if you're looking for some clear examples that rebut those arguments, you can also find that in the comments.
To me, there are a couple of clear issues here. The first has to do with availability and demand. Part of what makes the infrastructure argument so frustrating is disconnect between the message being used to promote the product being sold and the actual business practices. Consider, in the past ten years, I have personally made five or six infrastructure upgrades to my own home network. I've upgraded from no ethernet through 10Mbit and 100Mbit to 1Gbit ethernet. I've added wireless and improved my wireless network twice. Data on my home network can move anywhere from 64Mbps to 1000Mbps. During that time, I've been through two DSL providers and one cable provider, three DSL modems and two cable modems. And while my cable bandwidth far outperforms my old DSL bandwidth, it ranges from 2Mbps to bursts of 15Mbps. And yet my entire home network infrastructure probably cost less than the cost of one year of access through either DSL or Cable.
As we envision the infrastructure that we need, the information superhighway (to bring back an archaic term), we have turned the responsibility for managing our roads to a private system of toll booth operators that profit simply from having you sign up to access their system of roads -- regardless of whether you are driving. One early commenter to the Netflix post made an analogy to airplanes and airports. Perhaps a more accurate analogy might be that you pay for access to an airline that promises to fly you anywhere you want for a flat monthly fee. At the same time, for every 100 seats in the plane, they have sold 1000 seats to people, then offer those seats on a first come, first serve basis.
If we really want to see our online world transform, we need to see our infrastructure transform. While the world is building out faster and faster networks, the US continues to be held captive to an infrastructure that is limited an industry focused farming profits from legacy systems. Like the entertainment industry with physical media versus digital content, they're trying to prop up a fading industry by stifling innovation and evolution. Unless we change our direction on network infrastructure and network management at a broader policy level, we will increasingly see access and content decisions shaped entirely by the profit interests of a handful of content-carrier monopolies ala Comcast-NBC.
Think back to the promised Google experiment delivering Gigabit broadband service and how many cities were jumping through hoops trying to be part of the trial. This is something that the country needs, that the people want. Unfortunately, we aren't going to get there when the debate over whether 1.5, 2.0, 3.0 or even 4.8 Mbps is good enough.
While most of us are aware of these carrier practices (or rather, we know that sometimes our broadband doesn't seem as fast, even if we don't know what the cause is), the sad truth is that we haven't really had access to tools that enable us to accurately measure there performance beyond basic speed test sites and anecdotal tales on bulletin boards like you find on DSLReports. As a consumer, this makes it hard for you to competitively shop. Add to that the hassles of switching, and you often find yourself at the mercy of a very limited market. But what if you knew which ISPs delivered the best, most reliable bandwidth?
Fallout in the war for Net Neutrality
Late last year you may have picked up on a story about a disagreement between Comcast and Level3 -- or Comcast and Netflix, depending upon how you look at it. Essentially, Comcast noticed that every evening their network traffic ramps up as many of their customers grab their computers, their iPads or their Netflix-enabled Blue Ray players and begin streaming movies from Netflix. Since Comcast would prefer to stream their own digital content that they can charge for, they decided that Level3/Netflix should be forced to pay additional charges to deliver all of that Netflix content. And another battle over the issues of Net Neutrality started.
Recently, Netflix fired back. In this post on the Netflix tech blog, Netflix Performance on Top ISP Networks, Netflix documents the streaming performance of many US and Canadian ISPs. With the volume of streaming media that Netflix has been serving, they have been able to learn a lot about network performance and sustained content throughput. According to Netflix, when they stream an HD video, the ideal amount of bandwidth needed for optimal quality would be 4800 Kbits/second (4.8 Mbits /second). Based on their graphs, none of the ISPs are delivering sustained throughput at that level.
Finding the Take-away
You can look at this post from a lot of different angles and find a lot of meaning. If you're looking to argue from the side of an ISP or a carrier, you'll find comments on the lack of differentiation between services (or potentially levels of service) in averaging provider performance. You'll also find infrastructure costing and service level analogies that point to why Netflix streaming is such a bandwidth hog and how that hurts other users on the ISPs network. And if you're looking for some clear examples that rebut those arguments, you can also find that in the comments.
To me, there are a couple of clear issues here. The first has to do with availability and demand. Part of what makes the infrastructure argument so frustrating is disconnect between the message being used to promote the product being sold and the actual business practices. Consider, in the past ten years, I have personally made five or six infrastructure upgrades to my own home network. I've upgraded from no ethernet through 10Mbit and 100Mbit to 1Gbit ethernet. I've added wireless and improved my wireless network twice. Data on my home network can move anywhere from 64Mbps to 1000Mbps. During that time, I've been through two DSL providers and one cable provider, three DSL modems and two cable modems. And while my cable bandwidth far outperforms my old DSL bandwidth, it ranges from 2Mbps to bursts of 15Mbps. And yet my entire home network infrastructure probably cost less than the cost of one year of access through either DSL or Cable.
As we envision the infrastructure that we need, the information superhighway (to bring back an archaic term), we have turned the responsibility for managing our roads to a private system of toll booth operators that profit simply from having you sign up to access their system of roads -- regardless of whether you are driving. One early commenter to the Netflix post made an analogy to airplanes and airports. Perhaps a more accurate analogy might be that you pay for access to an airline that promises to fly you anywhere you want for a flat monthly fee. At the same time, for every 100 seats in the plane, they have sold 1000 seats to people, then offer those seats on a first come, first serve basis.
If we really want to see our online world transform, we need to see our infrastructure transform. While the world is building out faster and faster networks, the US continues to be held captive to an infrastructure that is limited an industry focused farming profits from legacy systems. Like the entertainment industry with physical media versus digital content, they're trying to prop up a fading industry by stifling innovation and evolution. Unless we change our direction on network infrastructure and network management at a broader policy level, we will increasingly see access and content decisions shaped entirely by the profit interests of a handful of content-carrier monopolies ala Comcast-NBC.
Think back to the promised Google experiment delivering Gigabit broadband service and how many cities were jumping through hoops trying to be part of the trial. This is something that the country needs, that the people want. Unfortunately, we aren't going to get there when the debate over whether 1.5, 2.0, 3.0 or even 4.8 Mbps is good enough.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Please Hire Me: Your Resume and the Great Document Structure Lie
Did you hate history class when you were in school? Perhaps you had one of those classes where they made you memorize dates. Maybe you found it frustrating that each year they would teach you the same stuff they taught you about last year. As someone who found myself in a lot of history classes in college, I can sympathize with your frustration and your boredom. For me, a good history class isn't about dates, it's about stories. One of the best classes that I took retold the story of history through cultural history. It was an amazing class.
The problem with telling a story through dates and places isn't just that it's boring, it's that it isn't really a story so much as a sequence of events. As an example, let's take the story of the Titanic. While most people could tell about what happened and include details drawn from a variety of cultural or historical references, what you probably would not get are dates and times nor any sense of importance of dates and times. So why does everyone expect your resume, the story of your career, to be structured as a listing of dates and places?
The problem with telling a story through dates and places isn't just that it's boring, it's that it isn't really a story so much as a sequence of events. As an example, let's take the story of the Titanic. While most people could tell about what happened and include details drawn from a variety of cultural or historical references, what you probably would not get are dates and times nor any sense of importance of dates and times. So why does everyone expect your resume, the story of your career, to be structured as a listing of dates and places?
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Links You Might Have Missed
Yesterday I came across this piece on creativity over on the Techcrunch site. The post is How I Use Visualization to Drive Creativity by Mark Suster. It's a long piece, but he packs in an executive summary, links to books, and more. It's definitely worth a read.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Please Hire Me: Your Resume Strategy and Getting Noticed or Ignored
Once upon a time, you could post your resume to the various job boards and feel like you had accomplished something. You'd post, they'd search, and then they would contact you. In a sea of job opportunities, if you had a strong background and an search-optimized resume, you could expect to receive inquiries with some regularity.
In today's economy, this passive demand generation approach is more likely to yield spam than any real opportunities. Instead, your real opportunities are more likely to come from your own searches, you own network, and your sales activities. The resume that get's you hired will likely be one that you submit to a company.
Submitting your resume has the potential to have a big impact on your selling process. Since you are responding to an open listing, you start with some basic knowledge of the target customer and the opportunity. It's kind of like responding to an RFP. In theory, this means that you can craft a unique selling tool for each and every resume submission. But with today's job market, even if you're the ideal candidate and a perfect fit, it's quite possible that your resume won't get any response, and all of that customization work that you went through will have been wasted.
In today's economy, this passive demand generation approach is more likely to yield spam than any real opportunities. Instead, your real opportunities are more likely to come from your own searches, you own network, and your sales activities. The resume that get's you hired will likely be one that you submit to a company.
Submitting your resume has the potential to have a big impact on your selling process. Since you are responding to an open listing, you start with some basic knowledge of the target customer and the opportunity. It's kind of like responding to an RFP. In theory, this means that you can craft a unique selling tool for each and every resume submission. But with today's job market, even if you're the ideal candidate and a perfect fit, it's quite possible that your resume won't get any response, and all of that customization work that you went through will have been wasted.
Monday, January 3, 2011
My Week at Dreamforce 2010
As I noted on the Twitter feed, a couple of weeks ago I was wading through the crowds at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2010 event. Like crowds and traffic anywhere, struggling against a tide of bodies to get somewhere can be frustrating at times, but as my thoughts wander and I reflect on Dreamforce, I keep finding myself thinking about the crowds. There is a part of me that feels like the crowd is a key message -- or in this case, perhaps it's "Crowd 2".
Let me start by saying, the crowd at Dreamforce is huge. They threw out numbers like 30,000 this year, but I didn't hear a specific official attendance number. It's also hard to visually measure attendance against some of the busier tradeshows at Moscone -- during your average tradeshow, the attendees are distributed throughout the show floor, while at Dreamforce, the crowds come together for many of the events. That being said, completely filling a floor full of seats in Moscone South is a lot of bodies.
If I seem stuck on the crowd, it's because I think that there is an underlying message here. For anyone that's new to Salesforce.com, being in the same location with so many Salesforce users and customers can be a powerful, reassuring experience -- and I think one that Salesforce has traditionally used as an effective sales tool. The crowd will also make you laugh about any of those, "but who is really using Salesforce" battles you might have had. But me, I've been to quite a few Salesforce.com events over the years; why am I feeling some deeper message from the crowd?
Let me start by saying, the crowd at Dreamforce is huge. They threw out numbers like 30,000 this year, but I didn't hear a specific official attendance number. It's also hard to visually measure attendance against some of the busier tradeshows at Moscone -- during your average tradeshow, the attendees are distributed throughout the show floor, while at Dreamforce, the crowds come together for many of the events. That being said, completely filling a floor full of seats in Moscone South is a lot of bodies.
If I seem stuck on the crowd, it's because I think that there is an underlying message here. For anyone that's new to Salesforce.com, being in the same location with so many Salesforce users and customers can be a powerful, reassuring experience -- and I think one that Salesforce has traditionally used as an effective sales tool. The crowd will also make you laugh about any of those, "but who is really using Salesforce" battles you might have had. But me, I've been to quite a few Salesforce.com events over the years; why am I feeling some deeper message from the crowd?
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