terms of the debate

photo by flickr user: varun2911

as the wga strike passes the one month mark and the rhetoric between both sides seems bogged down in contract minutiae, this paragraph in the latest essay by software developer joel spolsky struck me as the way we need to re-frame this discussion. joel wasn't writing about the strike - he was giving a speech to the computer science department at yale, his alma mater:

I noticed that the really good program managers at Microsoft were the ones who could write really well. Microsoft flipped its corporate strategy 180 degrees based on a single compelling email that Steve Sinofsky wrote called Cornell is Wired. The people who get to decide the terms of the debate are the ones who can write. The C programming language took over because The C Programming Language was such a great book.

it's amazing to think that microsoft's internet strategy was changed by an email and that a programming language would become the standard because it had the best written book. and it's this kind of acknowledgement of the power of writing that's missing from many of the conversations about this strike. it's also why i believe the writers can prevail in the end; not just because you can't support our massive entertainment needs without a serious amount of writing skill and creativity, but because as writers they have the power to define the fight.

"The people who get to decide the terms of the debate are the ones who can write."