Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Todd Rundgren

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:6/23/2000; 6:21:29 PM
Topic:Todd Rundgren
Msg #:18049
Prev/Next:18048 / 18050

Dave Winer: On reflection, it's the same story that Todd Rundgren tells, as often is the case Todd got there first. A couple of years ago he was telling anyone who would listen that he was leaving his record company, going straight to his fans through the Web. He was going to ask for the fans' support. What wasn't clear to me at the time was how little of the fan's money finds its way to the artists. I thought, probably as many did, that Todd's popularity was waning, and that his music wasn't profitable. I didn't consider the possibility that there was more to the story, I must remember to probe deeper in the future, and challenge my own assumptions.

I have a Todd Rundgren story, circa 1987-1988:

I worked at ICOM Simulations in suburban Chicago at the time. ICOM may be remembered as the developers of a series of games, "Deja Vu," "Uninvited," "Shadowgate," and "Deja Vu II," and among Mac developers as the developers of the TMON debugger. TMON got us a lot of attention among die-hard Mac developers, and ICOM was attempting to parlay this into some publishing deals.

Who should come to us as a developer, thinking we might be a good software publisher for their work but... Todd Rundgren. Todd had developed a very interesting, very cool... um... something. If I have to put it in a sound bite, it'd have to be "component software environment." This was the mid-eh-late '80s. No OpenDoc, not even shared libraries on the Mac yet. No C++ yet; folks doing objects at all were doing them with Object Pascal or Think's sort of funky C++-light or whatever it was. So here comes Todd Rundgren with a complete graphical environment, drag and drop new code into it, boom, you can see it working. Fine-grained components showing up on the fly and talking to each other. I remember it being very deep visually, very very different from the Finder, just a different paradigm, not stuck trying to be a flat, linear desktop, kind of a fusion of Todd (Rundgren) and Ted (Nelson).

Our (now late) CEO decided that it would put us in competition with Apple, a place we didn't want to be. No one ever said anything like that the idea was bad or the execution was bad; it was a purely business-oriented decision.

Todd said something then that has stuck with me ever since: "The future is component software. I'm going to keep beating this drum until I get it right."

Personally, I think Todd got it right in 1987 or thereabouts.

So it's no surprise that Todd got it right about the economics of the music business a couple of years before Courtney Love, either, although Ms. Love's writing about it is simultaneously shocking, heartbreaking, and infuriating, all while underscoring her obvious intelligence.

As usual, Dave, thanks for keeping me abreast of these vital cultural developments.

Regards, Paul



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