I've seen a number of comments lately about a blog post by Bob Cringely over at PBS. People have commented about how the Cringely team "dropped out" of the Google Lunar X PRIZE (that’s hard to do when you haven’t officially joined!). In any case, we are disappointed not to have Team Cringely involved in the competition and we wish them the best of luck in their efforts to get to the Moon. If they are successful in their ambitious plans, the staff of the X PRIZE Foundation will be among their most ardent supporters.

While I do sincerely wish Mr. Cringely luck, I also want to address some statements in his post.

[W]hile the X [PRIZE] Foundation released early on preliminary rules for the competition, they said the final rules wouldn't be cast in stone for another 20 months. For Team Cringely, with our very aggressive development schedule, this meant that we'd be landing on the Moon before the rules were finalized. We could win the contest only to find out that we were disqualified from receiving the prize. That's a hard one to explain to potential investors or sponsors. It still isn't clear why the X [PRIZE] Foundation feels the need to wait so long to finalize the rules, but they seem firm on this issue, which negates completely one of the strategic advantages of Team Cringely, which is essentially time to market.

By publishing a "95% solution," we have allowed teams to begin working in good faith, while still leaving ourselves a window to consider feedback from our registered teams, for which they have been generally appreciative. We have listened to our teams. In his post, Mr. Cringely omits a change detailed in the most recent version of the Guidelines which notes that the Guidelines may be finalized "as early as August 1, 2008." It’s true that teams do incur some risk by actively pursuing this prize while the rules are not 100% final, but we feel that the opportunity for teams to offer feedback on the rules strongly outweighs this risk.

He is also factually incorrect in his statement. The deadline he quotes is actually a "no later than" date, not a "no earlier than" date as implied. This distinction is clearly spelled out in the Official Guidelines Q&A, a document Mr. Cringley references later in his post.

The X [PRIZE] Foundation also required that rovers carry an "instrument package" weighing no more than 500 grams. We at Team Cringely came to call this the "bowling trophy," which we'd need to super glue to our one-kilogram rover. A pound of bowling trophy might mean very little to Carnegie Mellon University with its 500 lb. rover (and $100 million budget), but to Team Cringely it was a deal killer. More recently the rules have softened a bit to require that the bowling trophy be no more than a certain percentage of the vehicle weight, but we could never figure out why it was required at all. Couldn't we just paint X [PRIZE] logos on our rovers and be done with it? No explanation.

Mr. Cringely is correct that the requirement of carrying additional payload is indeed a difficult one. It is a difficult requirement by design. A key goal of the Google Lunar X PRIZE is to enable a new generation of systems that provide affordable lunar access. If a company cannot carry even a modest payload measured in the low 100s of grams, they will not have achieved this goal. Their mission will still have been a worthy achievement, but it will not have attained the goals of this prize, a fact accepted by our registered teams, including the teams that are designing extremely miniaturized rovers.

With this modest amount of payload, we have an opportunity to fulfill another of the X PRIZE Foundation’s major goals: education and outreach. This small amount of payload will be utilized to reach and inspire children and adults everywhere. It doesn't take much imagination to think of some great programs that will be enabled by this small payload.

But the biggest obstacle of all for Team Cringely was the X [PRIZE] Foundation's insistence that only it could come to agreement for commercial media coverage of the contest. Team Cringely couldn't cut its own TV deal, nor could it even make its own TV show if that was intended to be done for substantial revenue. That would be handled by the X [PRIZE] Foundation on behalf of all teams with coverage and revenue equally shared. While that position sounds egalitarian, it isn't. The X [PRIZE] Foundation has no significant experience in media licensing -- certainly they have less than we have at Team Cringely where we've sold TV shows over many years to more than 50 countries.

Here again, Mr. Cringely is factually incorrect. At no point does the X PRIZE Foundation state that the media revenue will be split between the teams equally. Indeed, the letter from which he quotes explicitly states that teams will receive different coverage and different portions of the revenue, with the winning team claiming the largest share of the net proceeds.

Regarding Mr. Cringely's claim to have more media experience: let this be a lesson about the dangers of assumptions! I’m sure that Mr. Cringely's assertion that we have "no significant experience in media licensing" would surprise the veteran Hollywood producer and the former manager of marketing for the Olympics on our staff.

In addition, the recently published Guidelines note that the "X PRIZE Foundation is hiring a major international agency to represent its competitions in the packaging and sale of television and other media rights." This agency was introduced to the teams at the Team Summit two weeks ago. Mr. Cringely quotes that exact sentence on the media agency, but offers no comment on it, commenting instead on another paragraph from the X PRIZE Foundation's guidelines revision cover letter, which talks about the need for one entity to combine and collectively market the content from multiple teams. Discussing an analogy that cover draws to the Olympics. Mr. Cringely says:

The problem with the Olympics analogy is that it doesn't hold up. There isn't one media deal for the Olympics, there is one media deal PER COMPETING COUNTRY -- PER TEAM. NBC doesn't buy the rights to broadcast the Olympics in Japan. And NBC's coverage is biased toward its own market, which means mainly covering the U.S. team, just as a Japanese broadcaster would have its own Olympic contract and would bias its coverage toward the Japanese team.

There is a clear misunderstanding of the Olympics analogy. While he is correct that there are multiple media deals which cover the different markets, all of those media deals are controlled by one central body--the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The IOC does not allow each competing country’s team to broker their own media deals Just as happens with the IOC, working through a centralized media-collecting body in this competition helps us to ensure quality coverage of the competition.

We even reached out to Google, which appeared to be aware of the issues and uncomfortable with the performance of the X [PRIZE] Foundation, but friendships were involved and Google is not a fast-moving organization anyway, so we got no help there.

I can’t speak to Mr. Cringely’s contact with Google, as there is no attribution for his comments. However, one needn't look very far to find clear contradictions to Mr. Cringely's assertions. Both Google and the X PRIZE Foundation have posted videos of Google Vice President Megan Smith and Co-founder and President Sergey Brin vocally supporting the way in which the X PRIZE Foundation has conducted this competition. Google also took part in the recent Team Summit Rules Workshop to discuss these exact issues--a workshop which Mr. Cringely elected not to attend.

In any case, I do wish Mr. Cringely well on his planned lunar mission, and look forward to seeing him on the Moon.

(Note: An earlier version of this story had Mr. Cringely's name misspelled in a few places. Apologies for that typo--and thanks to the readers who pointed that out!