There's always a compromise

Andrew Chen has written a great blog post about a recent visit he made to Pixar's Emeryville headquarters. Matt Silas of Pixar invited him to tour the facility, and at the end of the tour, Chen asked Silas what his favorite Pixar film is. Here's how Silas replied:

“This is such a tough question, because they are all good. And yet at the same time, it can be hard to watch one that you’ve worked on, because you spend so many hours on it. You know all the little choices you made, and all the shortcuts that were taken. And you remember the riskier things you could have tried but ended up not, because you couldn’t risk the schedule. And so when you are watching the movie, you can see all the flaws, and it isn’t until you see the faces of your friends and family that you start to forget them.”

The lesson that Chen drew is that developers will always think that their product is s**t, no matter how good it actually is. The lesson I take is that every product, every service, every work of art, is a compromise. Pixar is arguably the most successful movie studio of the last 30 years--with the exception of the recent "Cars 2", Pixar has had a nearly unbroken streak of both critically and financially successful motion pictures, starting with the original "Toy Story". And yet, even Pixar has to compromise in the production of its films. Team members sometimes have to take shortcuts and avoid changes that might have improved the films in order to stay on schedule.

"Supercar" manufacturers like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Rolls-Royce and Bentley like to say that they build "no compromise" automobiles, yet of course there are compromises: Their cars can cost upwards of $300,000 and get eight miles to the gallon. The compromise for their "no compromises" cars is to spend a huge amount of money when you buy, drive and service them (not to mention buy insurance for them). Buyers and reviewers regularly complain about the compromises made in the design of DSLRs and camcorders: Why is the imager's resolution so low (or so high)? Why doesn't it have a 1080P/60 mode? Why does it have a limited slow-motion capability (or none at all)? Why did they use a HDMI interface instead of SDI?

Every manufacturer has to make compromises in its products. Some are made because they have to keep the price of the product under a certain amount. Some are made to protect the profits from other product lines. (For example, if a new $10,000 camcorder is just as good and does everything that the company's $30,000 camcorder does, customers would be crazy to buy the $30,000 model.) And some impose compromises on the buyer: For example, if you want a true cinema lens, you'll need to spend several times as much for it as for a lens designed for still photography.

Product developers know that there's never enough time or money to make their products perfect. They work to make their products the best they can under the constraints that they have to live with. Even with software and services that can be continuously modified, they have to ship at some point. They may ship with a minimum viable product and then improve it from there, but they have to ship. That's why there are always compromises.

Moonbot Studios: Prototype for the "New Hollywood"?

Unless you're an iPad user, you probably haven't heard of Moonbot Studios, but you're likely to hear much more about them over the next few weeks. Moonbot develops interactive children's books for the iPad; its first project, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, started as a short film that's been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Update, February 26, 2012: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Moonbot isn't an animation studio, publisher or app developer--it's all of those things.

Moonbot was founded in 2009 by William Joyce, Brandon Oldenburg and Lampton Enochs. Joyce is an illustrator, graphic designer, writer and animator who's written and illustrated more than 50 children's books, created Rolie Polie Olie, one of the first computer-animated children's television shows (for which he received three Emmys), created character concepts for Pixar's Toy Story and A Bug's Life, and co-created and produced Blue Sky's Robots.

Moonbot's creations, Morris Lessmore and the new The Numberlys, which was released for the iPad earlier this month, are what the company calls "story apps". They combine elements of animated films, children's books, and videogames, but they're unique enough not to be classifiable as any of those things. It's that uniqueness that makes Moonbot's story apps early examples of a new medium, not just an extension of eBooks or films.

According to Fast Company, Moonbot stumbled onto its approach when working on Morris Lessmore, which was originally planned to be a short film and printed children's book. The iPad was released while the film was in production, and Joyce realized that it would enable Moonbot to do things that simply weren't possible previously...what he calls "a third way of expression".

If Moonbot is pioneering a new medium, what's its potential? It's too early to say how big the market size is, but if it develops like the video game industry, it'll both be big and largely independent of legacy media. Digi-Capital estimated that global video game industry revenues for 2011, including online and mobile games, were $87 billion, about twice the size of the global theatrical motion picture business.

The video game industry only tangentially depends on legacy media companies like movie studios and broadcasters--in fact, few video games based on movie characters have been successful. Moonbot isn't dependent on legacy media companies at all: It creates its own characters, writes its own stories, produces its own animation, builds its own apps and distributes its own works. It does all of that in Shreveport, Louisiana, a city not known as either a technology or media center, with only 35 employees.

The story app concept is no way limited to children--Moonbot's creations are as compelling to adults as they are to kids. It's still in its infancy; imagine how we'll be able to interact with these apps when we have Siri-style voice interaction and Kinect-style 3D motion detection to go along with touch gestures.

Could The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore be this new medium's The Great Train Robbery? I wouldn't bet against it.