Small comment piece I did for today’s Observer.
Nicely complimented by a Monday Note by Frederic Filloux on how illicit copying is an intrinsic part of the digital ecosystem. That suggests, he maintains, that we need to start being more imaginative in the way we combat ‘piracy’.
This morning’s Observer column about Kodak’s demise.
A good way of inoculating yourself from the wisdom of hindsight is to read Clayton Christensen’s seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, which is the best explanation we have of why and how successful firms can be undermined by disruptive innovations – even when they appear to be doing everything right: listening to their customers, watching the marketplace, and investing in research and development.The really sobering thought to emerge from Christensen’s book is that good decisions by great managers can still lead to corporate disaster. The reason is that while big companies are often good at fostering “sustaining” innovations – ones that enhance their positions in established markets – they are generally hopeless at dealing with innovations that completely disrupt those markets.So the question that Kodak’s demise raises in my mind is this: would any of us have done any better in 1976 after our R&D guys had come up with an idea that would cannibalise our core business and reduce our margins to near zero?
From my piece in yesterday’s Observer.
The big question is whether YouTube poses a strategic threat to the traditional television industry. Up to now, most observers have been sceptical about that. They see conventional TV and YouTube as inhabitants of parallel universes. TV is all about marshalling scarce and expensive resources, exerting tight editorial control and charging for content. YouTube is all about the absence of editorial control, not charging for content, harnessing the abundance of free, user-generated (and sometimes copyrighted) material and extracting value from it by attaching personalised advertising to video clips.
The parallel-universes theory appears to be supported by comparisons of how people use YouTube and conventional TV. While a lot of people visit YouTube every day, they stay, on average, for only 15 minutes. Conventional television viewing, on the other hand, at between four and five hours a day in the US, seems to be holding up quite well. On the basis of these numbers, can TV executives continue to sleep easily?
Maybe. But Google, which owns YouTube, has plans to increase the “stickiness” of YouTube by getting into the content-creation business…
This morning’s Observer column.
Here’s a trick question: who’s produced the most books in the past 30 years? Answer: a guy called Charles Simonyi. Eh? Well, I said it was a trick question. Mr Simonyi, you see, is the chap who created Microsoft Word, which is the word-processing program used by perhaps 95% of all writers currently extant, and although Simonyi didn’t actually write any books himself, the tool he made has definitely affected the ways texts are created. As Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, we shape our tools and afterwards they shape us.
I write with feeling on the matter. When I started in journalism, I wrote on a manual typewriter. After I’d composed a paragraph, I would look at it, scribble between the lines, cross out words, type some more before eventually tearing the page out of the machine and retyping the para on a fresh sheet. This would go on until my desk was engulfed in a rising tide of scrunched-up balls of paper.
So you can imagine my joy when Mr Simonyi’s program appeared…
The piece has attracted some very thoughtful comments.
Last Sunday’s Observer column.
The key to survival – in business as in the jungle – is to be able to learn from your mistakes. The strange thing is that some industries haven’t yet figured that out. Chief among them are the so-called “content” industries – the ones represented by huge multimedia corporations which own movie studios, record labels and publishing houses.
Every 20 years or so, technology throws up a challenge to these industries. When audio cassettes arrived, for example, the music industry fought tooth and nail to have the technology outlawed or crippled. Why? Because it would encourage “piracy”. What happened? The record labels wound up making lots of money from cassettes as well as records.
Then along came the video recorder, and the movie industry fought it tooth and nail because it was the handmaiden of the devil – on account of facilitating “piracy”. What happened? Same story: it turned out that the studios were able to make tons of money from videocassettes, because films continued to sell long after they had disappeared from cinemas.
Since then the story has been repeated at least twice more – with DVDs and portable MP3 players. So you’d think that the penny would have dropped in what might loosely be called the minds of those who run the content industries. The lesson is that new technologies that look like threats can become glorious opportunities. But there’s still no evidence that media moguls have grasped that simple idea.
I’ve long been an addict of Edge.org, the website/salon founded by John Brockman. I finally got to interview him for the Observer.
To say that John Brockman is a literary agent is like saying that David Hockney is a photographer. For while it’s true that Hockney has indeed made astonishingly creative use of photography, and Brockman is indeed a successful literary agent who represents an enviable stable of high-profile scientists and communicators, in both cases the description rather understates the reality. More accurate ways of describing Brockman would be to say that he is a “cultural impresario” or, as his friend Stewart Brand puts it, an “intellectual enzyme”. Brand goes on helpfully to explain that an enzyme is “a biological catalyst – an adroit enabler of otherwise impossible things”.
The first thing you notice about Brockman, though, is the interesting way he bridges CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” – the parallel universes of the arts and the sciences. When profilers ask him for pictures, one he often sends shows him with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, no less. Or shots of the billboard photographs of his head that were used to publicise an eminently forgettable 1968 movie. But he’s also one of the few people around who can phone Nobel laureates in science with a good chance that they will take the call.
First Observer column of 2012.
Now’s the time of year when columnists are expected to peer into crystal balls. Not being able to find such a device in his local Apple shop, all this columnist can do is to speculate on the implications of some developments that are already highly visible.
Online shopping, for example. A glance down any high street confirms that Amazon & Co is beginning to make inroads into the urban landscape. The costs of running a bricks and mortar shop – in rent, rates, inventory, theft and wages – together with the wafer-thin margins of most retailers (excluding Apple and other purveyors of luxury goods) meant that it was a knife-edge business at the best of times. But the combination of recession and intensified competition from online is proving too much for some retailers, which is why high streets are beginning to have a gap-toothed look…
This morning’s Observer column.
Needless to say, this intrusion of EU red tape into Britons’ ancient right to do as they damn well please generated much heated commentary. The jackbooted thugs of Brussels were, we were told, going to “kill the internet”. But the law is the law and, alarmed by the lack of preparedness of British industry, the government negotiated a year-long “lead-in period” to give businesses time to adapt to the new reality.
We’re now midway through that period, and the information commissioner – the guy who will have to enforce the new rules – has just issued a half-term report on how things are going. His verdict, he writes, “can be summed up by the schoolteacher’s favourite clichés: ‘could do better’ and ‘must try harder’.”
Technology review 2011: Twitter rules, BlackBerry crumbles and TS Eliot is reimagined.
That’s how the Observer summarised my retrospective look at the world of technology in 2011. I did also write about Facebook’s ‘valuation’, Apple’s extraordinary year, government fantasies about the employment potential of start-ups, HP, Nokia and the role of social networking in political upheaval.
All seen with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, of course.
The Observer asked me to write the introduction to a feature about digital cameras. This is how it begins…
The strange thing about photography is that although it’s been revolutionised by digital technology, at heart it’s the same medium that entranced Louis Daguerre, Eugène Atget and André Kertész, to name just three of its early masters. And although it’s become much easier to take photographs that are technically flawless (in terms of exposure and focus), it’s just as difficult to capture aesthetically satisfying images as it was in the age of film and chemicals. It turns out that technology is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for creating art.
Still, the technology is pretty impressive…
In the piece I pointed out that the iPhone is now the most popular camera among Flickr users (which highlights how distinctions between hitherto different types of device (phone/camera; MP3 player/phone; etc.) are becoming blurred. This morning I noticed that the Guardian had an interesting feature in which a professional photographer compared the images produced by an iPhone 4S and his top-of-the-range Canon DSLR. The phone turns in a very creditable performance.
A useful ArsTechnica piece comes to similar conclusions:
For snapshot purposes, the iPhone 4S is comparable to the 8MP Canon 20D when it comes to image quality. But that comparison is a little unfair—you can easily achieve better results with newer DSLRs in terms of exposure, noise, and megapixel count. What you can’t do with any DSLR, though, is (again) slip it into your pants pocket. Lenses that have as bright an aperture as the iPhone 4S’s f/2.4 will also either be limited to a single focal length or generally be much larger and heavier than the lightweight kit lenses that many users have.
Thanks to @4b5 on Twitter for the link.