The Net is for communications between people. Don’t shove products in our faces. We’ll know where to find you if you have what we want. If you make good stuff, we’ll hear about it. If you want to spread the word, give folks free shit without obligation and ask them to tell their friends. If you want to advertise, do so in context – context not of demographics, but of content.
As for the newspapers, they’ll probably end up coordinating hot freelancers, providing exposure and point of view, comprised mostly of people doing contract work. They link you, you link them, sharing cashHits. At that point, the difference between a newspaper, an institution, and some kid with a Web page of cool links, is of little import. One is cheaper to run, and faster on its feet.
If publishers are to stay on top, they can not simply rely on the biggest presses, they must offer the best content in their region. On the Net, the regions are amorphous, pertaining more to subject matter than geography. Specialization is important; if you try to cover everything, somebody is doing it better, and you can’t afford to pay someone to do things poorly.
In this setting [the Internet], the role for large publishers is empowerment. You can hire experts to predict the next great youth trend, and build a magazine around it, or you can give some inspired young people computers and let them do their thing. The best content comes from people who love what they are doing. You can’t hire experts to figure that out. But you can give resources to people who would do it anyway, and share in the fruits of their labor. Large publishers then become media stables, places that provide the computers and Net access for writers. The writers themselves provide the context – their point of view, and their area of specialization. Marketing is done through communities of interest.
Top-down publishing, trying to rein people in with exclusivity, registration, and proprietary technology is tantamount to fighting the Net. Working with the Net requires openness – unlimited content, ease of access, open standards, low overhead, independent producers. Of the two, working with the Net makes for better Web sites, and happier readers.
Give someone a digital camera, a laptop, and a cellular phone, and you’ve got an on-the-spot multimedia storyteller from anywhere in the world. The need for staff and overhead has been drastically reduced. The primacy of placement, the immediacy of the story is mandatory.
Mass media requires passivity while the Net resoundingly rejects it. This technology promotes decentralization. Force feeding the Net public heaping spoonfuls of what you think is tasty will fail – even if people have a choice of spoons. People want to talk to each other; if they are going to read something, they want it to be vibrant and heartfelt. Even now, large media has a hard time with both of those – in the future, on the Net, they will grow lifeless and useless faster than ever.
Looking ahead to the world of electronic meetings, we see big opportunities both in powerful processors and in other products that turn the world’s 100-million-plus PCs into multi-faceted communication devices.
The growing need to communicate quickly by computer is making such networks a competitive necessity for more companies. Advances in communications software will increase the demand for large networks, and thus for capable systems integrators.
You know we have people sleeping on the streets, and you talk about high-capacity networks? I mean if we are going to start talking about equal access, how about talking about food and residence and health care first? There isn’t enough public money to fund equal availability of an expensive infrastructure.