Working in Movement

I'm starting to get into some meaty parts of Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution, the book I mentioned in a previous post here. In a chapter called The Curve, Garreau expounds on the S-Curve of innovation, in this case mainly technical. The S-curve refers to what happens when something grows very, very quickly, doubling whatever it's measuring in a short period of time. "Moore's Law" of computer processing power doubling every 18-months is an example. In the context of the book, Garreau is getting at all of the technological/biological/etc. changes going on now taking us humans to places we haven't been before -- and doing so in a relatively short time.

Lots of speculation there. But I did run across another example of how fast things can change with the right technology, this time in music distribution. Behind Apple's Strategy: Be Second to Market in Harvard Business School Working Knowledge focuses mainly on Apple's wonderful Garageband music composition software. (If you haven't tried it, be prepared to piss away many an hour making music -- even if, like me, you are musically illiterate.) The piece mainly talks about how Apple's ability to simplify the interface has given it a big advantage in the market for such software, even other products hit the market first.

The thing I found most interesting (and related to the S-Curve thing) was the sheer amount of music Garageband users have published in just a couple of years.

MacJams.com, an online community for users of Apple's GarageBand software, has posted more than 7,500 songs made with GarageBand in the past eighteen months while a separate online community, iCompositions, has posted more than 12,600 songs.

By comparison, EMI, the U.K.-based music recording and publishing conglomerate, started operations in 1931 and has slowly grown to become the largest music publisher in the world, holding the rights to just more than one million compositions. The two standalone Web sites mentioned above, with little or no ability to attract (let alone pay) musicians, have compiled 2 percent of EMI's seventy-four-year, million-song catalog in less than eighteen months.

The article goes on to speculate that Apple may augment Garageband as a podcast production piece of software. Maybe there's another S-Curve; we'll have to wait that one out.