In the Washington Post yesterday, Steve Ballmer was quoted on the future of media, in conjunction with technology and what Microsoft is doing:
In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion.
Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.
10 years?
Yeah. If it’s 14 or if it’s 8, it’s immaterial to my fundamental point. . . . If we want TV to be more interactive, you’ll deliver it over an IP network. I mean, it’s sort of funny today. My son will stay up all night basically playing Xbox Live with friends that are in various parts of the world, and yet I can’t sit there in front of the TV and have the same kind of a social interaction around my favorite basketball game or golf match. It’s just because one of these things is delivered over an IP network and the other is not. . . .
In other words, it’s all about the capabilities of the medium. Television and print are both one-way mediums that don’t easily allow people to form communities and interact with each other and even help produce what’s on the screen (or page).
I think 10 years is a bit fast, but I think he’s right about the direction.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry.
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In the mobile telecom industry, 4G (that’s one generation after the current up-and-coming 3G standard) is aiming to be all-IP, too. I think that media’s headed that way, but I think these tech junkies forget how ferociously the older folks will cling to their paper media.
I also think that paper media won’t die until a few other things happen, such as being able to easily annotate e-books (I know the Kindle claims it can do this, but until it’s as easy as underlining with a pencil, I won’t give up my academic paperbacks) and freeing e-books from pesky DRM stuff. I like being able to loan my friend a new novel, and e-books just haven’t figured that out yet.
I agree, I think ten years is calling it a little too soon, and I actually think “all media” is a bit of an exaggeration. vinyl is as good of an example as any - people still sell records, because records have a certain value and characteristic that can’t be replicated digitally.
Similarly, there are aspects of paper that just can’t (and never will) be replicated digitally.
So I think that magazines and books will survive like records, although they’ll do a little better than records do.
Great point…..this race against time we face—of 14 days, or 30 days, etc., and then these cool graphics are lost to the ether. Every year we’ll look back at the previous year and shake our heads, wondering, “Why were holding onto those outmoded ways?”
I visited the Patriot Ledger website (www.ledger.com) the other day and was pleased to see they are incorporating basic video as a complement to online stories.
That’s my hometown paper, from 20-plus years ago, and that one quick clip (of a guy pleading not guilty) shows me that the Ledger “gets it,” at least a little bit.
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