The High Cost of Our Time

Time can be thought of as money. Most of us don’t think of it quite this way most of the time, but it explains a lot of our anxiety and neuroses around computers, and when we do think of time as money, some things become pretty clear. Let’s look at my upgrade path in terms of cost.

Figure, on average, the upgrade sets you back about $100 payable to the manufacturer.

Figure your time costs at $50/hour (assuming you’re middle-class and busy – see my November ‘94 article). Installation and debugging takes two hours on average (the actual range is fifteen minutes to ten hours, depending on the degree of difficulty for the given cyberware install). Learning, really learning, takes 24 hours, we said. Arithmetic says that’s $1,400 per upgrade, including what you pay to the manufacturer! Do this 26 times a year and you’ve dropped $36,400 in lost productivity or cyber-maintenance, whichever field you choose to key it into in your accounting software!

This is admittedly a worst case. But it also suggests at least one truth we usually ignore: we seldom take the time to become expert with our cyberware, because it is too expensive to do so. A couple of quite relevant examples should make the point clear. A studio owner I know can’t bear to install System 7.5 in his Macintoshes even though he’s got it sitting right there on CD-ROM, ready to go, because he is too busy to be able to risk the down time he figures he may need to get his new cyber-creature under control. Purchase cost of the upgrade was so trivial he bought it automatically, while the potential time-cost of implementation is too great for him to be willing to risk the down time. Another independent I know would like to upgrade her workstation hardware ‘n software, but feels she must defer it until bookings stop for long enough that she can make the changeover without subjecting her clients to her own learning curve and practice time! Think of it: she needs business to stop coming in so she can upgrade!

In both of these cases, the cost of upgrading has become (1) a significant fraction of the cost of doing business and (2) considerably greater than the cost of continuing with the status quo, contrary to the conventional wisdom that you’ve got to incessantly upgrade to stay competitive. The reason this has come to pass is that the rate of change has increased to a point where the time-cost of upgrading is now a significant portion of the total earning power of the particular upgrade, even when the physical cost is insignificant.

“Freeze time,” the guy says.

What Us Users Really Need From Manufacturers

Looked at this way, what us users really need from manufacturers is for them to charge a little more, like double, for their products so they can afford to absorb a lot more of the time cost, through more intensive and comprehensive debugging, backward and lateral compatibility, improved documentation, installation help, serious on-line and field support services, etc. However, because there is usually an inverse relationship between cost and unit sales, this may be pretty unrealistic to expect. Us users have got to be willing to play and pay for this game, too. It’s like the difference between buying at a warehouse outlet store or paying twice as much to the local guy who’ll set it up, bring it over in his pickup, and call you every spring to see how it’s doing. Which do you buy from?

Some manufacturers do sell “user-friendly” dedicated computer/hardware/software packaged systems. These have fairly carefully controlled upgrade cycles and more focused and well-developed operating systems and applications, to ease the pain and time-expense of operation. In such cases, you pay more up front to the manufacturer and less in lost time and productivity during the service life of that particular system or upgrade. You also have less flexibility, which may or may not be important to you.

The next best thing manufacturers can do is maintain a clearer line of communication regarding expectations and reality at both the sales and implementation stages of their operation. Also, perhaps, they might reconsider their client/vendor relationship to us, and instead try to think of themselves as service providers, as in you pay them for a certain level of function for a certain period of time during which they also take on your hand-holding needs and the responsibility for working through your particular operational problems, as well as developing recycling strategies to take back stuff when you’re ready to move up.

The Way They (The Manufacturer/Publishers) See It

When you’re a manufacturer/publisher, you see things a little differently, of course. There are some verities that are worth considering here.

We Gotta Stay Competitive!

First, the hard reality of it is that software and hardware in release is always obsolete. Hey, if it makes it out of alpha-test, it’s an antique!

At the same time, the need to be profitable places immense time-pressure on manufacturer/publishers. Cyberware has an extremely short life, and delays in release seriously reduce profitability. At a digital audio conference a couple years back, I heard a business type from a mega-player state that a 10% delay in release date will result in something like a 30% decrease in profits over the life of the product. Scary! So, when I said earlier that time is money, well, it’s probably ten times as true for the manufacturer/publisher as it is for us end-users. Manufacturer/publishers simply cannot afford to delay releases except for the most dire of problems.

All this leads to the present-day condition where all commercially available cyberware is both obsolete and defective (i.e. it has known limitations and flaws). Now, manufacturer/publishers aren’t particularly happy about this state of affairs. Their solution is sensible: they create upgrades to improve their products just as rapidly as they can, taking in as much feedback as they can from their users during the process. They do this at a frantic, manic pace, because huge swings in profitability hinge on their ability to revise and upgrade quickly.

I suspect that if they could, manufacturer/publishers would issue upgrades weekly, even daily (refer back to my fantasy). At some point in some parallel on-line hyperfuture, this may happen. Right now, hardware is upgraded maybe once every year and software every three to six months, limited by organizational hysteresis.

Our Clients’ Gotta Stay Competitive! Otherwise, No Way We Can Help “Em!

When manufacturer/publishers upgrade, they send mailings and/or upgrade copies to all of their registered users. And this is a place where they get really frustrated with us. One rep for a major DAW player told me that only about half of their purchasers ever bother to register their purchases. This leads to gross confusion, paranoia and product dysfunction in the field.

From the manufacturer/publisher’s standpoint, failure to register and failure to implement upgrades is like failing to take your car in for maintenance, or activate its warranty. Simple professionalism should cause you to keep your tools in tip-top cutting-edge shape, right? How can you be competitive in today’s fast-paced production world if you don’t keep your products current? How can they notify you of changes if you won’t tell them where you live? They feel, quite reasonably, that there is no way they can service you if you won’t stay in touch. Remember, also, they are so busy scrambling to keep their products in front of everybody else’s they have no reasonable way to keep track of all possible permutations and problems encountered by purchasers and subsequent repurchasers, particularly when said purchasers won’t tell them what problems they’re having.

Put yourself in their shoes for second: some clown calls up to bitch that his DAW just smoked and goddamit he wants help right now. They have no record of this guy, no idea of what version of anything he’s using, he’s too mad to talk coherently, and so the whole thing falls part. Maybe the software is pirated, maybe the equipment is stolen, or maybe its all legitimate and he just never bothered to follow up at point of sale. Whatever, it is really hard, maybe impossible, to take care of such a customer.

What Our Clients Tell Us They Need

While all this going on, everybody on the sales team and in related areas is busy telling the design group what the users really want. Product redefinition is great sport – everybody in the company loves to predict what will really make sales take off, and push the design team toward that vision. We users are all guilty of encouraging this. We tell our dealer or the sales guy at the show or whoever will listen, “Hey, what you guys really oughtta do is make this available with three more morph-splines and an adaptive preference system, no copy-protection plus mega-archiving, and it should do hyperswinching in the background.” In turn they tell the design guys and the president, “Hey everybody’s demanding hyperswinching, adaptive preferences and more morph-splines. We can’t afford not to get them in next week’s beta-upgrade!”

All this gives the designers a fresh, if skewed, insight, into what the product should really do. Creative ideas always run in front of design reality, and the priority has to be given to bringing those creative ideas to reality as fast as possible at a profit, and maybe then worrying about issues of backward compatibility and debugging for customers.

Dreaming The Impossible Dream

To make it all even worse, what we say we want (4 meg of hyperswinching) is actually far removed from what we really want. We really want to be making really cool music with the equipment, as in we have like really cool creative ideas and we want to like push this button, see, and all of a sudden our really cool creative ideas will come out as music, like, totally awesome, you know? It’s not that we are lazy, but we know what we want to do, and actually we’re just trying to, like, get ahold of a machine that’ll help us do it!

And the manufacturer/publishers would love to help us out – hey, they are really trying to do this very thing! Unfortunately, if what we’re doing is original, then the machine won’t get it the first time. It really is an impossible dream. We are going to have to work it all out ourselves – there’s no way out of that creative responsibility. And it’s not fair of you or me to blame the manufacturer/publishers because their products don’t do what we think!

How Our Clients Could Really Help Us Move Ahead!

Aside from a valid current credit-card, what manufacturer/publishers really need from customers is to stay in touch! This really translates as registering your purchases and communicating your needs and problems to the customer support team. Without getting into the issues of fear and loathing that surround customer support and the anxiety of dealing with an outfit you aren’t completely sure you trust, manufacturer/publishers profoundly need our feedback and to get a sense of how we are using their equipment, with what problems and what success. They need us to phone home but they don’t know how to ask!

They also need a kind of realistic reasonableness from us. They need for us, too, to be aware of the limitations of cyberspace, and their limits within it. It’s OK for us to dream the impossible dream, but they need us to accept the reality too: that their sales pitches only make the best case while there are always downsides and problems too. They need us to be ready and willing to share in the pain of creative and original work as well as the fun and joy of it.