AgPerson

The way this was supposed to play out was relatively straightforward. Barack Obama proposes a massive stimulus measure, and the opposition vocally opposes the irresponsible spending. Obama makes a few half-hearted attempts to reconcile with the Republicans, but in the end he passes his stimulus bill with little to no Republican support. They go on TV to decry the “business as usual” partisanship, and then when the effects of the stimulus are not immediately clear, Republicans reiterate that it was ill-advised.

But then Obama started inviting members to Super Bowl parties, and holding office hours, and coming to Capitol Hill for negotiating sessions. He started giving consideration to the Republican’s outlandish additions. He refused to let his party pass the bill without Republican support.

And the days wore on. And here we are. I am curious to see how it all turns out, and who comes out looking better, and what difference it makes in the end. Already Obama’s approval ratings have gone down 6 points. In that time Congressional Republicans have seen steeper drops, and Congressional Democrats haven’t been doing very well either, but Obama is the one to watch.

While my previous employer was very pro-blogging, my current employer seems to unofficially discourage it. Or, put another way, my organization, due to a variety of historical factors, is very sensitive to reputation. It is felt, perhaps to our detriment, that it is important to keep up a unified front.

Fortunately, I have never directly mentioned where I currently work, which I suppose is for the best. And I have never been good about following edicts.

So. Work. This is pretty much the first thing I’ve posted about it of any substance since I started there nearly eleven months ago.

The job I applied for, interviewed for, and was hired for ended up being quite a bit different from the job I found myself doing. When I was reorganized, my duties shifted even more. I came into this job with a conscious desire to put ego aside and learn a system that is completely new to me, at an IT organization that is far vaster than any place I have previously worked. I started in March, 2008. It took until, oh, this month to decide that my approach was not cutting it.

To simplify for the sake of coherence, my primary problem is this: when I got here, I quickly figured out that the scope of my responsibilities was far more narrow than I expected, and that what I was ostensibly in charge of was, at its core, an aged and difficult to maintain system that had no notion of a lot of modern developments in computing. It was expected that I would learn and maintain the system, and work within it, when my first instinct, in fact almost everything within me cried out, “start over! Make something better!”

I told the little voices to go away, and they did, for a time, but I became increasingly unhappy.

I am unhappy when I see inefficiences to be corrected that I cannot correct. I am unhappy when I am forced to do unproductive and rote tasks instead of innovative ones. I am unhappy when the community I support is underserved by the solutions available to them. And I am unhappy with this system.

But I shoved the voices aside, and I tried to make the best of it, and I became more and more unhappy and frustrated and angry. I couldn’t get through to the folks around me just by hinting or asking or making the occasional sarcastic comment. And while I spent a whole lot of time creating, improving, testing, and proving my new system, I was having no luck selling it.

In the last few days, something finally clicked for me. People around me recognize the need for some sort of change, but the specifics are elusive. There is so much work to be done just maintaining old, creaky code, and they are so wrapped up in keeping things running, that they do not have the mental energy to also be proposing radical changes. But I do.

I was hired into a role that no one quite understood, and my lack of a clear position in the institutional heirarchy was mostly a curse. But in some ways, it was also a blessing, for it gave me the time and view to see what should be changed and how to do it.

I have realized that the only way I am going to be happy here is if I push hard for the change I think we need. This approach may be risky, but I have confidence in both the strength of my ideas and the quality of my coworkers. If my plans come to fruition, things will be better around here. If it goes badly, I will leave knowing that I tried my best and that this place and I weren’t a good fit. But the odds are more heavily for the former than the latter, and this is a quest I have put off for far too long.

There. I hope that was obfuscated enough to be safe. Unfortunately, you still have no idea what it is I actually do. That’s okay, very few people do, including many of my colleagues. But I’m finally figuring it out, which is a good start!

Currently I am working days at Harvard, and nights on Bookly. Currently I am dealing with the season: short days, lots of snow and cold, not many opportunities to see the sun. Currently I’m eating badly and not playing much frisbee, and playing video games instead of reading, and watching TV instead of cooking, and staying up late instead of going to bed early. Currently I’m slowly making my way through The Great Gatsby, and then on to The Sirens of Titan, and then on to the next five things on my queue. Currently…I’m going skiing this weekend! Hooray!

Things aren’t especially bad, or especially good, they just are. It is winter, and winter is gloomy, and misty gray. It saps the color and the spirit out of everything. I’ve decided there is nothing to do but accept it, and read some more gloomy books, and fight with the cat, and trod onward towards spring.

At last week’s Macworld Expo Apple announced that they are transitioning all of the music in their iTunes Store to DRM free. This means no more arbitrary access restrictions, no more having to “authorize” computers, and that finally all of Apple’s music offerings can be played on non-iPod devices. Along with the moves comes a switch to variable pricing: back catalog songs will go for $0.69, midrange songs for the standard $0.99, and new hits for $1.29. This tiered pricing model was previously rejected by Apple, but appears to have been their tradeoff with the labels for the ability to sell music without restrictions on usage.

A year ago Amazon.com launched their own music store, the Amazon MP3 Store, which provided exclusively DRM-free music downloads, priced competitively with most albums selling for $8.99 and most tracks for $0.89 (Apple generally charged $9.99 and $0.99, respectively). The Amazon MP3 store never had the depth of catalog as iTunes, but does currently host over 3 million tracks, including most all currently popular major label music.

Record industry players were at times coy, but it seems clear that their goal with giving Amazon access to unrestricted music along with the ability to sell at lower price points was to attempt to dislodge iTunes as the market leader. I have always maintained both that Amazon is the better value, and that if Amazon overtook iTunes, their prices would very quickly rise to at least meet the iTunes price points. Which is to say, the cabal was continuing to fix prices, this time to give Amazon an unfair competitive advantage in order to topple iTunes.

It didn’t work. One year on, the Amazon store is a distant second to iTunes, holding only 8 percent of the digital download market. Meanwhile, iTunes sold somewhere in the range of 2.4 billion songs in 2008. ITunes remains the market leader, the iPod the dominant music player. And by withholding DRM-free music from iTunes, the record industry was shooting itself in the foot: the more tracks consumers purchase through iTunes, the more locked in they are to the iTunes-iPod empire. The best hope for the record labels, rather than stifling Apple’s attempts to sell unrestricted music, is to encourage, nay demand the practice.

The newly announced compromise in which Apple allows tiered pricing and the labels allow all iTunes music to be DRM-free looks at first blush to be a win for consumers, but it is bad news for Amazon. It means, in short, that the experiment is over, that their preferential pricing is no longer necessary or desirable for the industry. And sure enough, search for albums today on the Amazon MP3 store and you will see that most of them are selling for $9.99 instead of the previous $8.99, and single tracks have gone up to $0.99 from their original $0.89. If Apple does well selling hits for $1.29, expect to see that tiered pricing reflected in the Amazon store soon enough. And expect, in general, to pay at least a buck more per album, sometimes substantially more. The era of pricing competition in digital music sales is over.

In the course of some archiving I stumbled across the April 1st, 2003 hoax I perpetrated on the Brandeis community. On that day the home page of Boogle, the search tool I maintained to make finding and sharing files on the campus network easier, was replaced by a letter from the Recording Industry Association of America explaining how students would have the price of all music and movies on their computers added to their term bills. The reaction was, in many cases, sheer terror, probably because the hoax seemed so plausible.

Sadly, we did shut down the service shortly thereafter, due to mounting pressure from the actual RIAA and the increasingly hostile legal environment. The school newspaper covered both the hoax and the actual shutdown.