BRAINSTORM
The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
By Daniel Roth
It's
doubtful that Steve Jobs ever faced these kinds of interruptions.
"Daddy, I want to take a picture," says Owen Misterovich, motioning to
a digital camera on his father's desk. "Okay," says Pat Misterovich,
handing it to his 5-year-old son, who proceeds to snap a few
self-portraits. Then it's back to the work at hand: producing the next
great MP3 music player. Only instead of the simple, elegant lines of
the iPod, Misterovich's device will look just like a Pez dispenser. Oh,
and instead of working from a corporate campus in Cupertino, Calif.,
with nearly 12,000 employees, Misterovich is a stay-at-home dad,
creating his Pez MP3 player from the basement of his Springfield, Mo.,
home.
Misterovich is the former head of IT at the University of
Detroit Mercy. He has few of the engineering skills necessary to build
a device like this, no marketing experience, and absolutely no
corporate infrastructure. And yet he's got two factories—one in China,
one in the U.S.—vying to build the player. He has a small Austin
company started by an ex-Apple engineer designing the innards. And on
his blog, pezmp3.com,
he uses prospective buyers—some 1,500 people have already expressed
interest—as an R&D-center-meets-focus-group. What's better, he
asks, AAA batteries or Li-Ion? In come dozens of replies ("Go for the
AAA with a USB NiMh recharger if possible," suggests one reader).
What's a good slogan? Some 50 ideas roll in (one of the best: "Candy
for your ears"). By the end of this month the first prototype should be
in Misterovich's hands. "I don't know that this product could have come
to life years ago," he says. "I seriously doubt it. And if it did, it
wouldn't have come through a guy in his basement."
It used to be that a tinkerer like
Misterovich could, at best, hope to sell his idea to a big company.
More likely, he'd entertain friends with his Pez-sized visions. But a
number of factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way
never before possible, blurring the lines between those who make and
those who take. Unlike the dot-com fortune hunters of the late 1990s,
these do-it-yourselfers aren't deluding themselves with oversized
visions of what they might achieve. Instead, they're simply finding a
way—in this mass-produced, Wal-Mart world—to take power back, prove
that they can make the products that they want to consume, have
fun doing so, and, just maybe, make a few dollars. "What's happened is
a tremendous change in awareness," says Eric von Hippel, a professor at
the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the recent Democratizing Innovation.
"Conventional wisdom is so strong [in business] about
find-a-need-and-fill-it: 'We're the manufacturers; we design products;
we ask users what they need; we do it.' That has begun to crack."
Numerous currents have converged to produce this reaction.
Bloggers, those do-it-yourself journalists, showed big media that the
barriers to entry (like owning a printing press, say) didn't much
matter. Podcasters took radio into their own hands, creating audio
shows and putting them online. Amateur music producers, using software
that was once the province only of major labels, invented mash-ups:
combining songs into totally new ones, then giving them away or selling
them. And with the advent of services like Google AdSense, which let
people easily put advertising on their sites, these tinkerers
could—while not vaulting themselves into Bill Gates territory—at least
break even.
"Before, only the rich had access to tools and so only the rich
were professionals, and the rest were amateurs," says Noah Glass, the
co-founder of Odeo,
which offers a free service for making, hosting, and distributing
podcasts. "But now, as the creation tools have become easier to use and
more freely distributed through open source, through the Internet,
through awareness, more people have more access to more tools, so the
whole amateur-professional dichotomy is dissolving." Citizen engineers are taking this even further, trying their
hand not just in the digital world but in the physical world too. Much
as eBay transformed distribution, they're redefining design and
manufacture. The infrastructure is there: Yahoo.com
Groups make it easier for people to trade ideas and learn quickly; free
or cheap computer-aided-design (CAD) programs allow users to cobble
together blueprints; and inexpensive manufacturing in China allows the
idea to go from file to factory. There are even websites like Alibaba.com that will help these small-timers find Chinese factories eager for their work, meaning that the amateur nation has its own Match.com.
This may seem like a lot of effort to, say,
create a funny-looking MP3 player. But that's not this group's ethos.
"DIYers do things for irrational reasons," says Saul Griffith. "If it's
your passion and your love, you don't count how many hours you spend
doing it. That's why so many of these things end up being great." Griffith should know. A dedicated kite-surfer—the sport
involves riding a small board through water while attached to a
parachute-like "kite"—he was unhappy with the goods on the market. In
2001 he started Zeroprestige.com,
a website where he posted his kite designs. Soon other amateurs
submitted their own concepts, and sail manufacturers with excess
capacity offered to make kites from the plans. The amateur designers
kept coming back to make exactly what they wanted to buy. And though no
one got rich, a few small businesses popped up to sell the finished
products. Since then, kites have become commodities, but Griffith
hasn't let go of the spirit. His four-person engineering company, Squid
Labs, is launching a site this summer tentatively called iFabricate,
"a Wikipedia for atoms," he says, referring to the user-created online
encyclopedia. Do-it-yourselfers of all stripes will be able to go to
the site to trade ideas and work together, get easy access to programs
for manipulating materials, and eventually use it to pool their
resources for buying raw materials from suppliers.
A few large companies, too, are finding ways to tap into the
movement. While most of the leading-edge DIYers view open-source
software as their inspiration, Microsoft sees a role for itself. The
company's Visual Studio Express software—slated for official release
later this year—is designed to bring coding to the masses. Microsoft is
also talking about working with things like Phidgets,
inexpensive, easily manipulated electronic parts like RFID components—a
radio chip expected to supplant the bar code—that would allow you to,
say, make your own keyless home-entry system. Microsoft estimates there
are six million professional developers and 18 million amateurs:
hobbyists, tinkerers, students. The company hopes to make Visual Studio
Express the Esperanto of amateur builders. Brian Keller, product
manager for Visual Studio, says he looks forward to the day when "my
mom can sit down and watch a video and learn how to build an RFID
reader for herself." For those moms who can't wait for the video, publisher O'Reilly Media recently launched what has already become the bible of this new movement, a magazine called Make.
It features page after page of geeked-out—but not unachievable—how-tos;
the latest issue details the finer points of crafting your own printed
circuitboard or building your own teleprompter (anticipating the
inevitable rise of video blogging). O'Reilly initially estimated that
it could snare about 10,000 people willing to pay the steep $35 a year
for the quarterly. Now, four months after the launch—and with almost no
advertising—it already has 25,000 subscribers.
To be fair, all this amateur energy isn't exactly a new force.
When exciting technologies emerge, Americans have always pounced and
created something original. In his 1936 New Yorker article
"Farewell, My Lovely," E.B. White eulogized the Model T and the
creativity it inspired in its owners: "When you bought a Ford, you
figured you had a start—a vibrant, spirited framework to which could be
screwed an almost limitless assortment of decorative and functional
hardware.... Gadget bred gadget. Owners not only bought ready-made
gadgets, they invented gadgets to meet special needs." The difference
today is simply the technology, says University of Virginia technology
historian Bernie Carlson: "I would call it the Ralph Waldo Emerson or
Henry David Thoreau theme, that it's as important to produce as it is
to consume." And so Misterovich, from his not-quite-Walden, keeps at his
goal of building the kind of MP3 player that he wants to carry around.
One with a collectible head and AAA batteries and a user-created
slogan. And even if he pulls it off, it's doubtful that he'll get rich.
That's fine with him. The purpose in the amateur economy isn't always
the same as in the big-company economy. "My main goal is not to lose my
house," he says. "You put it on the line and you want to be rewarded.
But when it comes down to it, I just don't want to go broke. It's an
amateur attitude—you're doing it for the love."
