[PEN-L:28257] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Something strange about this crisis

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "joanna bujes" <joanna.bujes@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

>
> Hmm. I understand a little more, but it still seems that you're conflating
> a lot of stuff. It might be that in the the meltdown of a speculative boom,
> everything looks like snake oil, but it's not really. The conflation is
> especially intense in your para about branding.

================

Sorry, but I am struggling to condense some of the problems of a $ 10 trillion
economy into 4 paragraphs :-)
It seems that right now a lot of people do see it all as snake oil and we can't
predict when the skepticism will end. As for branding, it is snake oil, a
conjuring trick, in that "consumers" are led to [un]think of the ongoing
construction/performance of self via commodities; that's just neo-Veblenian
stuff. When companies are paying workers more to construct an image of the self
for those who buy their product than they expend on the labor to make the
physical product itself, it ain't just the consumer who's being scammed. Naomi
Klein's "No Logo" is the best contemporary excavation of that process from a
social psychology perspective. A Marxian "information economics" that takes a
real hard look at  the labor process at places like MSoft, Sun, Oracle etc. has
yet to be written, although "Cutting Edge" by Jim Davis and Michael Stack and
"The Critical Study of Work" edited by Rick Baldoz, Charles Kroeber and Philip
Kraft are very good.




> Let me put it another way: in the hi tech company I used to work for, the
> highest paid programmer made 200,000/year; the highest paid salesman made
> 2,000,000. Also, in all the hi-tech companies I've ever worked, for the
> expense in R & D (which is especially large in this field) was often less
> than the expense of marketing.  Now, if I understand you right, you're
> saying that one consequence of the current ruination is that the production
> of knowledge/products will be somehow separated from the production of
> market share. How exactly can this happen in a capitalist, market-driven
> economy?
>
> Joanna

==================

I think that the incentives to motivate those who practice the skill of sales
are now going to be a lot tougher for firms in the info tech biz., because
they're going to have a harder time getting other firms that buy IT stuff to
believe that what's being sold is a substantial improvement over what they've
already got. Thus, the need to invest in R&D is probably going to go up at the
very moment when firm's market shares are saturated or contracting; ever more
complex modes of product differentiation will face ever more
discriminating/skeptical purchasing managers and consumers at the same time that
many firms need to be paying off debt in order to secure future access to
credit. Michael Perelman's latest book goes into all the paradoxes regarding the
investment in R&D as does James Boyle's "Shamans, Software and Spleens."

I don't think that the production of knowledge products can be separated from
the knowledge firms invest in to sell their stuff; that is selling, too, and the
modes of making sales is going to be very knowledge intensive now.
Vaporware/Bullshit detectors in the purchasing departments of firms are at a
premium right now. I don't see how paying sales teams more is going to overcome
that hurdle.

Ian