The writers strike appears to be over. The Guild’s leadership seems thrilled. People who invest in studios are too. A story about ideas, features, and better writing.
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Two things struck me about the WGA announcing their deal. One — other than calling it, “Exceptional,” writers were tight-lipped with details. I guess that’s why they’re writers and not actors. Second — they write really badly.
“What we have won in this contract – most particularly, everything we have gained since May 2nd – is due to the willingness of this membership to exercise its power, to demonstrate its solidarity, to walk side-by-side, to endure the pain and uncertainty of the past 146 days. It is the leverage generated by your strike, in concert with the extraordinary support of our union siblings, that finally brought the companies back to the table to make a deal.”
Seriously, what?
The Flesch–Kincaid readability test scores the above as extremely difficult.
Could have been, “Eleven thousand of you took it on the chin to help us win stuff we didn’t think we could get.” F-K score: easy.
Since I wrote about strikes yesterday and the WGA offers no details are here, I’m going to use this to talk about the business of media.
And that business is Grammarly.
Wow. Talk about a plot twist that would make Agatha Christie proud. A dead butler and none of the eight invited guests done it.
If you don’t know it, Grammarly is a service that checks your grammar and spelling. Thirty million people use it. Some folks pay about $140 a year for a suped-up version. Paid or unpaid, people use it hoping to write a little more good. The company has been since 2009 and is valued at more than $10 billion. Since it’s private, we don’t know if it makes money. Most insiders speculate they don’t. Which is still a story for another day.
I love the Grammarly story because it follows one of my favorite investing quotes.
“Fellas, it’s cheaper to drill on the New Stock Exchange,” maverick oil man and self-made billionaire, T. Boone Pickens in 1980.
Staggeringly powerful in it simplicity. Pickens couldn’t have been a pro writer. When he said it, Exxon was trading at $1. A dollar. They had oil. Why risk paying to look for oil when they’re giving it away with stocks.
Smart people don’t take risks.
You know who made 90% of Grammarly before Grammarly? Microsoft. Almost all the key features are baked in to Word. Spellcheck as you type — check. Grammar checking — check. Word scoring, readability, all there. All free.
So, why does Microsoft bury this feature in one of their apps (Word), embedded in one of their products (Office), housed in one of their division (software)… like Russian nesting dolls? … because Microsoft is worth two and half trillion dollars. The team that works on spelling is lost in the sprawling bureaucracy needed to run such as massive enterprise.
How lost? $10B (value of Grammarly) ÷ $2.5T (value of Microsoft). Or about 0.4%.
Why won’t Microsoft do more with it? We can thank Neil deGrasse Tyson for that answer.
If you saw a quarter on the ground, it’s not worth your time to pick it up. You walk by. Bill Gates is so rich, Dr. Tyson calculated that Bill would walk by $45,000.
Microsoft isn’t going to bend over to pick $10b. So the folks who started Grammarly didn’t have to drill for a new idea. They just took one lying on the floor of the New York Stock Exhange. OK, NASDAQ.
Folks who start companies don’t take risks.