Creative Looks Gift Horse In Mouth, Shoots it In Head, Apologizes Afterwards
Posted on April 4, 2008
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 155 views |
Dear Creative: you’re doing it wrong.
But in all seriousness, Creative’s mis-handling of this situation is a great learning opportunity for other companies. The lesson is simple:
If your users care enough about your product to improve it themselves, thank them. Use them. Hire them. Pay them.
William Gibsom famously wrote:
The street finds its own use for things.
The equation at play is very simple: no matter how many big brains you have inside your organization creating things, there are more big brains outside your organization doing whatever they damned well please with your product. In an age of digital distribution, with the ubiquity of decompilers, and facing an army of hackers who’ve used computers since they day they were born, the corporation is no longer in control.
The open-source community already understands this. In fact, it speaks to the fundamental tenet upon which OSS is built: that you too can make it better and in doing so, mine is better too.
Not every hardware company will get this. Fewer still will support it. But it behooves all consumer hardware companies to, at the very least, turn a willing blind eye to the hacking of their products. Don’t alienate the hackers, embrace them. They just might create your next business model for you.
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