Net Boom, Act II
Rich Karlgaard writes in the new issue of Forbes [via Corante] about the next wave of the Internet's influence on mainstream business. He makes the great point that the first wave introduces a new technology but the second wave destroys everything in its path:
...PC Boom, Act II, which began in late 1986, turned out to be anything but cute. It was a serial killer. Desktop publishing wiped out typesetting shops. Computer-aided design squashed draftsmen's careers. Intel and Microsoft grew big and ruled the planet, while the old guard of Digital Equipment, Data General and Wang were taken over, trivialized or snuffed.
Rich believes we're entering a similar second wave with the Internet and calls into question his own livelihood as a magazine editor (paper is so last century). While I'm not a believer that new media kills old media and wouldn't want to predict the death of any one industry, it's hard to argue with his overarching point: the effects of the Internet are only just beginning to be felt and will reach much further into our daily lives than the PC revolution did a decade ago.
New media doesn't kill old media -- it focuses it. When a disruptive new technology enters the market, like television, the existing technology, like radio, tends to shrink down to just what it excels at. When was the last time you listened to radio drama, Garrison Keillor excepted?
So what does the Web squeeze? Look what Yahoo Finance has done to those pages and pages of tiny type listing yesterdays closing stock prices. Look what Craig's List and Ebay have done to the classified ads. Newspapers may, in fact, be near the end of their usefulness, at least in those regards. But that's a far cry from the death of print, however.
Hi Veen, not sure I agree. I think weblogs are to publishing what Ebay has been to flea-shops...