Another blanket article about the pros and cons of Direct to Consumer (D2C) isn’t needed, I know. By now, we all know the rules for how this model enters a market: its disruption fights any given sector’s established sales model, a fuzzy compromise is temporarily met, and the lean innovator always wins out in the end.

That’s exactly how it played out in the music industry when Apple and record companies created a digital storefront in iTunes to usher music sales into the online era. What now appears to have been a stopgap compromise, iTunes was the standard model for 5-6 years until consumers realized there was no point in purchasing and owning digital media when internet speeds increased and they could listen to it for free through a music streaming service.  In 2013, streaming models are the new music consumption standard. Netflix is nearly parallel in the film and TV world, though they’ve done a better job keeping it all under one roof. Apple mastered retail sales so well that the majority of Apple products, when bought in-person, are bought at an Apple store. That’s even more impressive when you consider how few Apple stores there are in the U.S. (253) compared to big box electronics stores that sell Apple products like Best Buy (1,100) Yet while some industries have implemented a D2C approach to great success, others haven’t even dipped a toe in the D2C pool, most notably the auto industry.

What got me thinking about this topic is the recent flurry of attention Tesla Motors has received for its D2C model. It all came to a head at the beginning of July when a petition on whitehouse.gov to allow Tesla to sell directly to consumers in all 50 states reached the 100,000 signatures required for administration comment. As you might imagine, many powerful car dealership owners armed with lobbyists have made a big stink about Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and Product Architect, choosing to sidestep the traditional supply chain and instead opting to sell directly to their customers through their website. These dealership owners say that they’re against the idea because they want to protect consumers, but the real motive is that they want to defend their right to exist (and who wouldn’t?). They essentially have a monopoly at their position in the sales process, and they want to keep it that way. More frightening for the dealerships is the possibility that once Tesla starts selling directly to consumers, so will the big three automakers, and they fear that would be the end of the road for their business. Interestingly enough, the big three flirted with the idea of D2C in the early 90’s before they were met with fierce backlash from dealerships. I’m sure the dealership community has no interest in mounting a fight like that again. 

To say that the laws preventing Tesla from selling online are peripherally relevant would be a compliment. By and large, the laws the dealerships point to fall under the umbrella of “Franchise Laws” that were put in place at the dawn of car sales to protect franchisees against manufacturers opening their own stores and undercutting the franchise that had invested so much to sell the manufacturer’s cars.  There’s certainly a need for those laws to exist, because no owner of a dealership selling Jeeps wants Chrysler to open their own dealership next door and sell them for substantially less. However, because Tesla is independently owned and isn’t currently selling their cars through any third party dealership, this law doesn’t really apply to them. Until their cars are sold through independent dealerships, they’re incapable of undercutting anyone by implementing D2C structure.

I suspect that many of you are familiar with the term "hard coding a value" whereby the age of an individual or their location is written into the condition (or action) of a business rule (in this case) as shown below:

if customer.age > 21 and customer.city == 'denver'

then ...

Such coding practices are perfectly expectable provided that the conditional values, age and city, never change. They become entirely unacceptable if a need for different values could be anticipated. A classic example of where this practice occurred that caused considerable heartache in the IT industry was the Y2K issue where dates were updated using only the last 2 digits of a four digit number because the first 2 digits were hard-coded to 19 i.e. 1998, 1999. All was well provided that the date did not advance to a time beyond the 1900’s since no one could be certain of what would happen when the millennia arrived (2000). A considerably amount of work (albeit boring) and money, approximately $200 billion, went into revising systems by way of software rewrites and computer chip replacements in order to thwart any detrimental outcomes. It is obvious how a simple change or an assumption can have sweeping consequences.

You may wonder what Y2K has to do with Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS). Well, what if we considered rules themselves to be hard-coded. If we were to write 100s of rules in Java, .NET or whatever language that only worked for a given scenario or assumption, would that not constitute hard-coded logic? By hard-coded, we obviously mean compiled. For example, if a credit card company has a variety of bonus campaigns, each with their own unique list of rules that may change within a week’s time, what would be the most effective way of writing software to deal with these responsibilities?

As developers we are overwhelmed with the number of language choices made available to us. It wasn't so long ago that C and it's object oriented sibling C++ where the mainstay of any programmer. Now though we have languages which make certain tasks so easy and simple that we simply cannot afford to ignore them.

In this article we are going to look at the overall differences between Python, Perl and TCL. All formidable and worthy in their own right, but each one has been designed to suit a specific programming need.

1)– Perl is the most mature out of the three languages we are looking at in this article. It was originally designed for processing textual data, and it does so extremely well. Of course Perl has grown over time and can be used for a multitude of different programming scenarios.

 Unlike traditional online courses that charge a fee, limit enrollment and provide credit or certification, Moocs (massive open online courses) are usually free or low cost and can host hundreds of  thousands global participants.  Although MOOC have been around for years in the form of collective techie learning gatherings, participation in 2012 has ballooned at a rapid pace likened to FaceBook in its heyday.  According to The Year of the MOOCarticle in the New YorkTimes, edX, a nonprofit start-up backed by Harvard and MIT, had 370,000 registrants in the fall of its first official courses. This paled in comparison to the amount of students that Courseraattained in its first year of online learning opportunities, 1.7 million!

Will MOOCs Replace education as we know it?

Like any new trend, massive participation in online classes has its challenges. Lynda Weinman has ample experience when pointing out that they are by no means a replacement for formal education.  As a former digital animator, special effects designer and classroom college teacher, Linda paved the path for an earlier version of MOOC education in the mid 90’s when she founded Lynda.comas an aide to her own students. Over four million students and 2,200 courses later she’s confident when clarifying that many of the collegespartnered with Lynda.com use the tutorials as added features to their existing courses.  When asked in an interview with ReadWriteBuilders, if high technical companies look at online programs in terms of advancement as a supplement to traditional education or as a way for people to further their careers, Lynda feels that “it’sjust one example of something that you can do to enhance your attractiveness to potential employers. But [it’s also important to have] a portfolio and body of work, references that actually work out, showing that you had success in the past.”

MOOC Benefits: