Centerfield

MIT Media Lab Freed For Innovation?

For years and years, the MIT Media Lab has been a money sink in the hands of Nick Negroponte. Nick has been the ultimate player of what we in the computer industry call "demo or die". Tens (hundreds?) of millions were spent paying for leading-edge gadgetry, grad students and researchers, and a very nice building or two. Hundreds of demos came out, but astonishingly few useful ideas for a place like MIT. They created satellite branches to spread to Ireland and India, but funding was withdrawn from each within a few years.

So what is demo or die? Well, it means you pour in vast time and effort to make something look plausible. If you're working on network protocol, a way of transferring data from one machine to another, you make sure and put in most of the time on a nice animation of the data moving over a diagram of a network. If you get an actual network protocol done, that's a nice extra. Funders come and see the demoes and some are enthusiastic and write nice checks, even if the rest of us know it's just a demo.

Mind you, MIT has students smart and energetic enough to have swept some good stuff by despite this culture, but especially by MIT standards, it's a serlous underperformer.

Negroponte just stepped aside in favor of Frank Moss. Negroponte wants to spend full-time on getting cheap ($100) PCs to poor children. I hope that Moss doesn't fall into the same kind of bad ways as Negroponte did, and I wish Negroponte best wishes in his work now. Hopefully he's better at this; hard to tell as yet since so far all we have is a demo and promises of money....