A Man Made a Deal with the Devil
Every now and then I write something completely off base from my standard fare about software, technology and business. This is one of those times, the following post has absolutely nothing to do with CRM so you don’t need to read it if that’s what you’re here for. This is simply about some cultural observations that I wanted to write down. Some times you just need to scratch an itch.
As a casual viewer of cable television over the summer I’ve noticed some similarities and wonder what they mean. Summer Olympics changed my viewing habits, which I suppose is the reason networks bid so much for the right to carry them. Upend the established viewing pattern and you can find you’ve changed your place in the pecking order. Chants of “USA, USA” turn to “We’re number 1!” in viewership if you are lucky.
In my case this worked rather well but the losers were all the established broadcast networks, including NBC, which spent a small fortune on broadcasting the Olympics, and the big winners are shows on cable with smaller followings. I found the new shows more to my liking and more important, it was possible to watch a whole season of reruns in a few nights and move on to yet another good new cable show.
The shows I’ve glommed onto are Californication, Boss and The Newsroom. Say what you want about my taste and my politics, I don’t care. This piece is actually trying to be the kind of literally analysis I vaguely recall from college.
To me, all three shows use as their basic theme the Faust legend. That’s the old story about a man making a deal with the devil; usually but not always, the story involves a smart person auctioning off his soul for all eternity for a few years of earthly bliss. In the story the devil has the power to grant temporary riches, strength, beauty and intelligence and the recipient accepts the offer and promptly goes on one heck of a bender for, let’s say, twenty years.
Admittedly, that sounds like a bad deal these days with little discussion of options, renewals, and syndication or out clauses. But that’s the charm of the premise and the three shows examine, in one way or another, how the protagonist deals with an increasingly bad deal. To make it interesting, each show in its own way concentrates on the main character’s efforts to either deal with a bad hand (the twenty years is almost up) or simply slog through what passes for happiness.
The latter is a fair summary of Californication. In this show, which has five seasons under its belt, the protagonist, Hank Moody played by David Duchovny, is a former east coast college professor of literature who’s written a couple of novels. Moody relocated to California about many seasons ago to accept Big Money for screen writing gigs and to pursue his interests in Porsches, brown liquor and easy women in any combination you, or the writers, care to imagine.
Although he’s been at it for years, Moody still cruises through southern California with a mix of incredulity and aplomb, which is not to say comfort. He’s out of his element and can still be surprised by what he sees but he fakes it admirably, there are many times when he’s a pilgrim making little progress. This is especially true when dealing with his ex-wife and college age daughter, girl friends who want to get serious, or, heck, any female love interest.
Moody’s deal seems to be that he can enjoy any wonderful thing he wants but he can’t truly have it; he can sample but not possess. So he visits the Ex- but doesn’t get any, drives his agent’s Porsche, has forbidden sex with a gangster’s girl, and generally tempts fate. He even landed in prison at one point. Not to worry though, his contracts seem to renew regularly and he is never in real mortal danger. Perhaps we need to wait a few more seasons. Moody is still playing out the deal he made with impunity.
Then there’s Boss, Kelsey Grammer’s very good if slightly unbelievable production based on “what it must be like” to be the mayor of a mythical Chicago. As political shows go, this is not The West Wing. It’s all about angles and calculation and nary a word about the better angels of our nature. It is the first show I am aware of that makes a main character Democratic politician into a bad guy. I have always wondered if this show was financed by someone like the Koch brothers — Look that’s the real Chicago! Sure, Obama has a U.S. birth certificate, but look at his political roots! (I know what you might be thinking, but if you don’t like this one, write your own. This is mine.)
More accurately, Grammer’s mayor, Tom Kane, is a kind of anti-hero. Kane is in the early stages of the devil’s reclamation of his soul. After one full season we know that he has an incurable degenerative brain disorder and it almost seems like he is, at times at least, trying to make a few things right before the long good night. Breaking good? That’s not allowed. He’s been mayor for about twenty years and he’s driven forward by his wife who is the daughter of a former mayor of similar long standing and curiously, similar dementia. The daughter/wife seems to be the one with steel in her spine Grammer just plays the role at city hall. She is the guardian assigned to keep tabs on the devil’s investment.
Boss is well acted and well written if it is a tad unbelievable in the gangland depictions of some activities in Chicagoland and the gratuitous sex which is designed to simultaneously depict the sterility and animal passions of this political world. Boss is a classic examination of the idea that the ends justify the means.
Finally, just arrived this summer, is The Newsroom, a show about the news department at the number two rated cable news channel. One of the many great things about this show is its creator and primary writer, Aaron Sorkin, who has The West Wing, Sports Night and The Social Network on his resume, and that’s just for starters. The show is great fun to watch because it is cut like a good movie with long flashbacks and other techniques designed to make you think. It is also written over the real news from about a year ago. Nothing fictional about the script’s fiction except how these characters handle the moment (with some help from Sorkin’s hindsight).
If Kane shows a Democrat as a bad guy, The Newsroom takes equal liberty to portray the show’s anchorman, Will McAvoy played by Jeff Daniels, as a Republican and something of a real intellectual. McAvoy’s positions sound so progressive and so reasonable that Sorkin feels obligated to remind us from time to time that this is a Republican because we certainly don’t get it from the script which is focused on extremists. Is this what it used to be like? Can we have it back? Not so fast.
Deeper examination shows a journalist who is totally and finally fed up with the mess the political discourse has made of his beloved news. He’s a burned out ghost walking through the halls of his former life and part of the show’s recurring plot is an attempt to get him back. This is made clear in the opening credits as images of Chet Huntley, Walter Cronkite and Saint Edward R. Murrow parade through along with an animation of Sputnik.
Those must have been the good old days of high minded broadcast journalism unfettered by analysts and ratings. Sorkin makes sure to also point out that the news back then was, in Stephen Colbert’s phrase, “newsier” and less polluted by self-promoters and flat earth theories. But isn’t that what nostalgia is all about?
In some ways, The Newsroom is the biggest homage to the Faust legend because it shows the viewer that you are part of this too, this mess is yours and that’s the point, I think, of all these shows. If the society we live in smells like a dead fish it is our dead fish collectively. But Sorkin is too good a writer to let you know that he knows you know so the plot is much less obvious than Californication. Heck with a title like that can anything be subtle in that show?
So Will McAvoy has done multiple deals with the devil. The show opened with him a bit burned out from trading his Serious Journalist Cred for ratings — say it ain’t so! The opening makes a believable connection between the way we are and the way we as consumers of the news have let journalism slide. The series is set around the very American premise that you can get your virginity back if you do an about face on all that is here and head west. In this case to go west is to say, screw the ratings, LET’S DO THE NEWS!
It hasn’t been that simple since they closed the frontier in 1890, alas. The one percent still want to eat, after all. Jane Fonda as the executive-owner of the network who wants to pander to the Tea Party admirably holds down that end. I wonder where she got her inspiration for the role?
Networks like ratings which makes it hard to explain why the network hired Mackenzie McHale, played by Emily Mortimer, to produce the news. She supplies part of the cocoon around McAvoy so that he can do his stuff even though she once broke his heart. For this indiscretion, Mortimer’s McHale is serving time in her own private purgatory and is visited there by McAvoy who sometimes plays the role of resident devil torturing her. If it sounds confusing it is not. It simply accentuates the many skills of creator and primary writer Sorkin.
So, by my count, there are at least three shows that borrow liberally form the Faust cannon to weave very different stories about contemporary American life. What do we make of this? Is it simply coincidence? Are all the writers and producers simply mining a rich vein? If they are just mining the question remains. Why are they all mining this vein at this particular time? Is it midnight in the American Cinderella story too? September 11, 2011 is too far removed from today to suggest it has an impact here. But it does seem like something became badly unhinged at some point in the not too distant past in this mythical America portrayed on cable.
I think it’s not 9/11 though. It would be too cliché for all these shows to somehow reflect back to those events. I think these shows all, in one way or another, try to answer the question, what do you do when you have everything? Everything is at the heart of Faust and in some iterations, the character discovers everything isn’t enough while in others everything eludes him like the green light at the end of Daisy Buchannan’s dock. In a sense they are generational shows reflecting back at baby boomers the choices they’ve made over the last few decades as the richest, most well educated but also most spoiled generation in the history of the planet.
Any way you slice it, the main characters are middle aged strivers who, like Norman Mailer, once reached the top of the mountain huffing and puffing only to ask, Is that it? There’s never been a satisfactory answer to that one. Maybe that’s all there is here. Three shows that explore what it’s like to reach the top with gas left in the tank, all dressed up but with nowhere else to go. Come to think of it, each incorporates Sisyphus too because they keep coming back anyhow. It’s a golden treadmill and a sobering thought. Faust may not be pretty to contemplate but these shows are entertaining as hell.
Deciding the Future of Mobile?
I am indebted to my friends at the Enterprise Irregulars, for the links in this piece. The IE’s, if you didn’t know, are a rag tag group of certified smarties who know all kinds of stuff about the greater tech industry and I am flattered that they let me hang out with them.
The aftermath of the verdict from the patent infringement lawsuit between Apple and Samsung initially generated more heat than light. But the last few days have made up for the light that failed to emanate from the weekend’s id fest and Armageddon prediction Internet confab.
Reuters is running an interesting story about Apple CEO Tim Cook and Larry Page of Google keeping the hotline open — you really need to be a child of the 1960’s to fully appreciate this metaphor. Suffice it to say that it is the origin of the little red phone. But also, there was this really interesting post at ZDNet by Jason Perlow about Samsung and Google’s collective need for a new dress.
I particularly recommend Perlow’s article because, while the idea of product dress might seem weird to some people — especially those who take issue with the look and feel aspects of the Apple suit — it might interest you to know that product dress is a legal term.
Without giving away Perlow’s point, let’s just make the observation that the classic Coke Bottle, which has nothing to do with how the stuff tastes, is part of Coke’s dress and its IP, as much as its secret recipe. Only Coke has Coke Bottles, for a good reason. So go read that article.
My point here, other than giving a shout out to the IE’s and trying to enlighten others, is that Apple might have, at least momentarily, hit on the only look and feel for mobile devices that will ever be widely accepted. Tapping, swiping, pinching — things that come natural not only to the members of our Genus but also our Family and, who knows, maybe even our Order — might be so hardwired into our beings that coming up with an alternative might be a waste of time. Holy $%^& Batman that might mean that Apple could end up owning the mobile UI and someday soon be in a position to make a few pennies on every Samsung or HTC device running Andriod for ever.
Believe it or not, such an outcome would not be unique in the annals of business or manufacturing. It might have something to do with cross licensing (I know, but don’t confuse it with dressing mentioned above). That’s when more than one company asserts ownership rights to an invention that each came up with the old fashioned way (you know, R&D?). But rather than fighting about it for years, the two (or more) companies come to terms, some money and possibly other patents are traded and then it’s back to business.
The best example of this is the car industry. Car radios, V-8 engines, automatic transmissions, how heating and air conditioning systems work, how the controls are set up and lots more, all have patents and if all cars look more or less alike in some basic features and functions, it might be because their makers went to the same patent swap meet. Yes, patents expire so don’t go looking to fund the fifth generation grand kids college even if you have lot of patents.
So this brings us back to Larry and Tim and the hotline. May we be informal for a moment and simply refer to each other using first names like they do in the music biz (Elvis, John, Paul, George, and especially Ringo; but also Bono, Sting, Eric and many others)? So, Larry bought Motorola (early car radio patents, BTW) at least in part for its stable of patents to ward off just the kind of suit that Tim’s company is making famous in the mobile industry (Tim should file a patent! hahaha!). And Larry, Tim and their minions are keeping the lines of communication open as they say.
What are the odds that the verdict put the discussions into high gear and that there’s an informal-formal patent swap meet happening out in the Valley between these principals? Nothing would surprise me but I think that if both sides remain reasonable and use their inside voices and big words, that there will be an announcement in the not too distant future that they’ve struck a deal.
If so, the deal would create the stack of the decade. Just as Wintel described a stack of Windows OS and Intel chips that made the personal computer; or as LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP for cloud application servers, some standard that combines Mobile/Google/Android/Motorola/Apple might emerge from all this chaos for mobile devices.
Let’s see, MOGAM? MOGA? GAAMMO? AGAMO? AAM? AA? Who knows, naming might be the stickiest part of the negotiations that aren’t happening on the hot line at the moment.
Let’s Do Dreamforce
Did I mention that I have a tiny speaking part this year. So happy! Not sure when it is yet but Esteban Kolsky, Brent Leary and I are on a panel. How cool is that? You should go.
I am also intent on meeting up with you and learning about your company, products etc. But! There are a lot of you and only one of me. So, for all this to work we need a plan, a system, a strategy. Moe! Larry! The cheese!
So here’s what I suggest. Please don’t email me asking when I am free because I expect to be sleeping then. But do email me with a couple of times that you could sustain a meeting with hurricane Denis. Let’s figure 20-30 minutes and your booth is fine if you give me the number, your cell phone and ensure that the trade show floor is open at that time. I won’t have an exhibitor’s badge and though an analyst credential get’s you far, it won’t get me past security.
If you don’t have a booth or don’t want to meet there, that’s cool, please suggest times anyhow and also (obviously) a place.
Finally, I arrive on the 17th and can take meetings that afternoon too. I am looking forward to seeing as many companies as I can. So, let’s doDreamforce!
Dreamforce Previews
So far, I’ve only been briefed under NDA so there’s not much I can report. But the earnings call from last week gave some insight into what might be on the table in September. During the call with analysts, President, CEO, Chairman and Co-founder Marc Benioff talked about some of the product lines and his interest in making the Marketing Cloud #1 in its space. You can read the whole transcript here.
The Service Cloud has passed the $500 million run rate and is well on the way to being a billion dollar revenue generator for the company according to Benioff. That’s important because the company is very keen to show it is more than an SFA vendor and half a billion bucks draws some attention.
But Benioff’s major focus was on the Marketing Cloud, which was first announced last year with the acquisition of Radian6 for $300 million and enhanced by the purchase of Buddy Media. At the earnings call Benioff said, “We believe that CMOs are going to want their own cockpit to fly, their own fighter jets, because honestly, CMOs are going to start spending much more than CIOs in technology.” You can’t argue with that. But more interestingly, he went on to say “IBM has said that, a lot of companies have said that. We agree with that and we want to invest so that we can take advantage of that spend.”
All right then.
But this raises some interesting questions. In any company there are pockets of power. The CEO has the most but each of the C-level officers has a turf to defend. If the CEO is king then the others are dukes and princes. So the thing I want to know, which is unknowable now, is whether the CIO will become more like the CMO or if the CMO will become more like the CIO? Will both positions survive?
These are interesting questions. Over the last thirty years each of these titles has evolved out of almost nothing and, believe it or not, each has traversed roughly the same path from geeky silo to strategic thinker. CIOs came out of MIS, which at one time was focused on keeping all the green lights flashing and writing programs for reports. But the CIO became a player when he or she got an MBA and began contributing strategic ideas about how IT could help the company save, and especially make, money.
The CMO has a similar founding myth. Marketing became captive of the CFO when computer based financial systems began to show the truth of the old maxim, “Half my marketing budget is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” Over time, according to friend and CMO consultant extraordinaire Thor Johnson, CMOs have also taken the MBA route and begun talking less in the board room about mailings and hit rates and more about revenue, costs and benefits.
The glue that keeps the CIO and CMO inextricably bound is IT but IT isn’t what it was when this all started. IT today, as Benioff’s company has been positioning it over time, is positioned more at the line of business. The marketer has less need for IT in a world that is increasingly socialized through products that can be manipulated almost as easily as an iPad.
Also, with products like those from Salesforce and other cloud providers, costs are lower and therefore budgets can shrink somewhat. This is not to say that IT and the CIO are becoming relics or that there are no big technology hurdles left to overcome. Just the opposite. But when we start to look at budgets, money is power and the dukes and princes all want more.
So that’s the genesis of my question — will the CMO become more like the CIO or the reverse? This kind of quandary is rarely Boolean and so a dark horse like the CRO becomes very interesting. Of course, this is all way ahead of things. Right now we’re trying to figure out if the Marketing Cloud can generate billion dollar revenues for Salesforce as Benioff is predicting butit’a also part of a future we need to discern.
At the earnings call, Salesforce increased its guidance to analysts that it would have revenues in excess of $3 billion in its current fiscal year. Getting service and marketing to contribute at the billion dollar level gets the company into the five billion dollar range and into the Fortune 500 with a comfy margin.
Benioff was also talking up the company’s developer platform and internal social network for enterprises of all sizes (Chatter). So far much of what we’ll learn at Dreamforce is still under wraps but one thing being actively discussed is the raft of CEOs attending which will include Richard Branson (Virgin), Jeff Immelt (General Electric), Angela Ahrendts (Burberry). Dreamforce has never been dull but this one is shaping up to be something else.
