Oct

23

Creative Disruption Disrupted

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

And now for something entirely new (here, at least) – a Book Review.  I have been reading Simon Waldman’s new book, Creative Disruption (FT Prentice Hall 2010 ISBN 978-0-273-72573-2). And a very good read it is too, full of thought provoking insight. I recommend it. Simon, known to many in the industry as the digital strategist at Guardian Media Group during its discovery, adoption and triumphs in creating digital media marketspace for itself, has a great deal to say. His core observation, derived from four interesting case studies, is that real world companies receiving the painful jolt of a swift kick in the digitals can and must re-invent themselves through a three stage process of re-generation. This involves a transformation of their core business, the discovery of big adjacencies, and the ability to “innovate round the edges”. His case studies include Encyclopaedia Britannica, Apple, IBM and HMV, and within their recent history he is able to demonstrate how these processes operate. And his point is that the re-invention of these businesses could not have taken place without the digitally-inspired disruption which can be so creative but for many companies can also simply demonstrate the inadequacy of management, the disaffection of audience from brand, or the inability to understand, finance or harness the transition to technology innovation.

So I completed my readings in total agreement with Simon, but rather wishing he had written a slightly less panoramic study. At some point in the generation of this work, I hear Simon’s publishers saying, as publishers always say, “Can’t you widen the scope a bit? So much of this is about media, the land of the vanishing headcount. We need buyers, so please bring in the whole range of tech businesses – and then point to the wider business world, so we can promote this as a vade mecum for industrial re-invention!” Simon has answered these syren cries very well, but for this reviewer this entails an element of regret. I wanted to read from a master with this experience exactly how media markets will be regenerated. In some ways he points in the direction that I was discussing in the previous blog – and indexing to his successors at the Guardian. What if emerging from the the flames of digital transition leads to businesses with less revenue but higher margins on the revenues they retain? Certainly Britannica qualifies there, and probably HMV. But Apple? Or IBM? We may be in danger of putting strictly non-comparable items into the same scales for measurement and judgement; and then finding that our measurement system needs to be re-calibrated in order to make any sensible generalizations at all.

And I would like to say that this aspect of the book is redeemed by a chapter late on entitled “Out of print:the reinvention of book publishers”. This has its interesting aspects, but leaves me where I was already: we have all seen newspapers and the music industry go over Niagara in a barrel, and I hope, with Simon, that  book publishers “have learned eough to get the basics right from the outset”. Since he is talking about another consumer market, however, I must eschew his genial optimism. By far the larger part of the management of consumer book publishing known to me have, while embracing a digital strategy, regarded everything that emerges from it as a defence mechanism to protect the printed book. Using the eBook creatively in multimedia formats (as that wonderful, wilful publisher Peter Kindersley did within the chronic limitations of CD-ROM in the mid-1990’s) is just not happening. Managements seem to view continuity as a strategic aim, and re-invention as a car crash unless it has instant acceptability. Simon uses a favourite Latin tag: Contra vim mortis, medicanem non est in hortis. There is indeed “no cure for death in a garden”, and as these thoughts are written from the bottom of my garden during the “little death” of autumn, I see a great deal more of it in media marketplaces than he does.

But here is a hopeful note. Simon quotes from what I recall as a conversation with him during the writing of this book when he makes reference to the potential of turning research articles on X-rays into a workflow solution for digital training of X-ray technicians. I want to refer Simon to the excellent Brian O’Leary’s “Unified Field Theory of Publishing” http://bit.ly/bQspSU.  There he will find that passive content no longer has value in networked applications. O’Leary is a “context” man, but his context is ever closer to my workflow. The problem we all face is not just that it is very hard to get people who are not used to it to start analysing the active, problem solving applications of content in the lives of their users/consumers, but it is well nigh impossible to do that if the end purpose is to defend the rigid linear internal production workflow model of the publisher, who cannot conceive of relinquishing his containers or his pricing models, or the accident-waiting-to-happen business model of advertising.

Mischievously, I was also thinking of Simon’s general business readers when I opened a press release from Experian. That company now offers “Decisioning as a Service” http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/experian-now-offers-decisioning-as-a-servicesm-the-industrys-only-hosted-environment-to-manage-and-optimize-business-decisions-105163364.html, creating a workflow model around decision making and designing in, presumably from the web as well as their own copious resources all the content you need to inform and support a decision. I am sure that this solution does not work at all levels, but it is at once indicative of where the content market is going and poses a challenge to all who commentate on Digital Disruption: why don’t we go and create the modelling that does the job and indicates, even if in outline only, what we need to do in order to transition an old and broken business model into a networked (and mobilely networked) society in a context of rapid change with no foreseeable end. Now that would be a workflow triumph!

Sep

21

Light in August

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Everytime I settle down to write this piece Unintended Events intervene. As a result a piece intended for late August is being typed in hospital in mid-September – and I am even being evicted from the safety of this refuge tomorrow. So, enough about explaining how the title got on this piece.

But the Light in question is still bright in my eyes, and it derived from reading the August 17 Wired article by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff (“The Web is dead, Long Live the Internet”) (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1) at the same time as Technology Review’s article about the crisis facing the porn industry (http://www.technology review.com/web/26074/). I have a great admiration for Mr Anderson, since I think his finger is close to the pulse on most things. And his argument now is compelling, though perhaps its factual base is less secure than we think. He is saying that Web usage on the internet is now dwarfed by peer-to-peer file sharing and video downloads, that despite growing use of the Web (if it is in fact growing), its shrinkage as a proportion of internet usage is the trend to watch, and both he and Wolff are arguing for a world where apps rule, and users are happier with pre-prepared service environments a la Jobs and Zuckerberg, even if, with greater effort, they could construct the same effect for themselves – for free.

Meanwhile, we must note with sadness the passing of a porn industry whose works are now being widely pirated, where peer-to-peer is as great a danger as it was to the music industry a decade ago, and where streaming video now ranks sites like PornHub and Xvideo in the top 60 sites on the Web. Even though these tubes are free video environments that undermine the rest of the industry while claiming to be dealing in “user-generated” (aka “liberated”) content.  And what a joy it is to report porn industry associations pleading for better intellectual property protection, and bemoaning the lack of effective industry statistics.

So what exercises me about all of this? Well, in the first place I used to advise clients in the 90s, when we had less experience of anything, that the porn players were wonderful role models for viral marketing, copy protection, the ability to keep pricing and sales perpetually refreshed, and mapping behaviour and purchasing patterns. And maybe they were, but the problems of the Web still caught up with them. Yet some of my best friends are only, even now, arriving at the Web and trying to re-create themselves as Web 2.0 orientated business and professional information environments. How am I going to break the news that the Web is dead, and even the porno rats cannot make a living?

The clues come in the last few lines. The Web may be dead as an info/entertainment resource, but as a community it probably has a long life, and there is ecommerce to be done within that community. We do need to revert to stricter definitions of the Web and the Internet, and more clearly see the former sitting on top of the latter, and not allow them to elide in common parlance (I plead guilty as charged). And we must acknowledge that the emerging world of active information solutions is an Internet activity, not a Web-based one, just as the emerging world of apps seems to belong more in mobile networks, not the Web. Yes, the Web will help us sell all these things, but they are not rooted there. The major workflow projects now afoot which will wholly transform B2B, and professional information, into services and solutions in the next five years are creatures of the Intranet and the Internet. They may draw content in part from Web discovery, but the Dark of private subscription contract services in the non-entertainment sectors already outweighs the commoditized content of the Open Web, even if it uses that material and adds private value to it.

What we are not getting our heads around is the relationship of the mobile network, mostly owned and controlled by third parties, and the Internet. It is a real issue, and one that must be tackled before access and tariff barriers become the real issues. And the Web will go on operating much as it does today for a very long time. A bit like the world of print. Amongst all of this we are slowly learning that not every tool can be used for everything. The Web is 18: by the time it comes of age as a medium we may know much more precisely what it is (not) for.

A final note. To the kind reader who asked whether I had given upwriting for August, the answer is clearly “No”. Having disposed of the Search economy, Google, and the Web in my last two posts, I feel entitled to a productivity award. And a reminder of Chris Anderson (who is, I think, actually an Englishman raised in North America). I had the pleasure of speaking just before him at the Google Unbound conference some years ago. As he replaced me at the podium, he remarked in a kindly manner “If I had that accent people here would think me 15% more intelligent than I am.”  My response – “does that mean that without it I would be 15% less intelligent than I appear?” – was mercifully drowned by the reaction to his remark. But I still regret saying it.

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