I'll explain the picture in a moment. It ties in, so read on...
I gave Michael Mace's Mobile Opportunity blog an endorsement a couple days ago at the end of a long but relatively content-free placeholder post. But his latest missive looks like the start of something particularly good so I figured I'd give him another plug. I'm eager to hear what he has to say on the topic he's taken up: the battle between the the middlemen who "own the pipes" that deliver content to consumers and the creators and innovators who want to break the middleman's stranglehold on the channel.
Mike shares the Silicon Valley frustration with channel oligarchs of all stripes: wireless carriers, publishing houses, music labels, electronic software distributors, etc. He also shares the idealism about a promised land where little guys can topple giants with an idea and some small digital stones. But he's been there long enough to be pragmatic and subtle about the course that needs to be mapped through the wilderness to get to that place:
The late Peter Drucker once predicted that electronic publishing was on the verge of making magazines obsolete. Today, 28 years after he made that prediction, electronic publishing is still on the verge of making magazines obsolete. This is typical of much of the analysis of new content channels--it tends to focus on the benefits and gloss over the process of getting from here to there. We assume the benefits are so compelling that it'll just happen. But in my experience the real world doesn't usually work that way. If you dig into the details, there's usually a tipping point that combines economic models, new technology, and new business infrastructure that must be created before a new channel takes off. If any element is missing, the transition never happens at all.
The barriers are very different in each industry, which means the pipes won't all change at once, and some of them may not change at all. To figure out what needs to be done, you have to look at each case individually.
Watch that space over the coming weeks. It should be interesting, and I'll be especially keen to hear what he has to say about wireless data if he gets to that subject.
Mike also links to a related blog that I just added to my roll: The Long Tail by Wired writer Chris Anderson. My friend Jeff Duntemann got me re-inspired about the Long Tail phenomenon when his first sci-fi novel, The Cunning Blood, published by an equally new small publisher, recently shot to #76 in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy category on Amazon because of a very brief mention on Instapundit and glowing Amazon reviews. As you can see from the screenshot, that was right ahead of the Left Behind book, a fact that I know was gratifying for Jeff on multiple levels! It's great to see brilliant writing and bold ideas beating out the conservative hit-making machine that has been throttling the publishing industry in recent years.
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