Good > Evil

Lisa: “Beware the Ides of March.”

Homer: “No.”

Hulu has a strategy problem. So do we; people are often myopic with things like this. They judge the merit of the service in a vacuum, using it to predict success, and altogether miss the larger issues. It’s easy to be distracted by usable iterations that dot the graph between revolutions.

But with $15 million in development costs alone and hundreds of millions more tied into the venture, “usable iteration” probably wasn’t the desired result.

I’m only beginning to understand the ideas presented by Seth, Umair, etc., but central to their business philosophy is a simple maxim: good beats evil.

A pre-roll advertisement or spam email may not be as intuitively bad as baby seal clubbing. It’s simply annoying. But if you look deeper, into the core of the organization (or DNA, as Umair puts it), you see an evil that most of us, at least historically are familiar with: control. A primary interest in exploiting value, not creating it. Ryan Holiday put it well:

“The problem with Hulu is that ultimately, everything about it was designed around the question of ‘How can we stick more ads in this?’ Was YouTube designed that way?”

That sort of model worked when I couldn’t skip commercials, shop at Amazon, or download whatever I want for free. I only gave you my attention when I didn’t have a choice.

So what happens when this assumption is no longer true? When the wall is dilapidated from innovation and market forces? Organizations like Google come along and pulverize it.

Understand that this is not New Hippie Economics. It’s not about moral imperatives or airy coffeehouse talk. It is simply the model that works given the economic machinery we now have. Do unto others, or they’ll find another way. You can choose to be that way–the new way–or you can bitch when somebody else eats your lunch.