Just a week after Netflix announced a million dollar prize for anyone who could come up with a better system for recommending movies to users based on their past rental patterns, more than 8-thousand teams have signed up.And as of this morning, three of them have already come up with programs that are more reliable than Netflix. The $1 million prize only goes to a team that can improve Netflix's system by 10% or more, and nobody's achieved that goal yet. But it has only been a week.
I'm guessing most of the programmers at Netflix don't earn anywhere near $1 million a year. So either this contest demonstrates that "crowdsourcing" your work will result in the best and the brightest coming together to make a better product, or you just need to pay your programmers better if you want them to produce. I'm going to go with the first one for now, I'm feeling like an optimist today.
