From Best Education Sites comes the fantastically entertaining and informative infographic embedded below (scroll down!): The Internet A Decade Later.
Amidst the colourful ghosts of browsers and search histories past was an important lesson for tech companies of the present: INNOVATE, OR DIE. In a section titled, “Refusal to Adapt Resulted in a Failure to Thrive” comes the tragic stories of Blockbuster (“refused…to buy Netflix and was reluctant to roll out subscription-based membership”), Borders (“refused to make an on-line bookstore”) and Tower Records (“was slow to adapt to digital music.)” It ends with this ominous message:
“The internet will continue to change, progress and expand. Will Facebook become the new Friendster? Only time will tell.”
It’s a cold, hard truth of business that if you don’t fill a need, someone else will—and they’ll get those customers you lost along the way. The internet hasn’t changed that, it’s just sped things up because the customer has more access to information about who is doing it better than you are. Either they’ll find out somebody is, and go to them, or they’ll find out nobody is—and you’ll be safe only until it’s a customer with an entrepreneurial bent who finds this out.
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On a related note, consider this argument from Techdirt on the ‘stupidity of going without.’ The ‘Just Do Without It’ argument is usually made whenever discussions of piracy come up. Inevitably, there will be a handful of unrepentants who pirate “just because.” But then, there will also be the handful who pirate because there truly is no channel available to them through which they can acquire the content legitimately. There is a gap in the market which has not been filled. There is a need not being met. And the response to those whose needs aren’t being met? “Then just do without!”
Here’s what Techdirt has to say about that:
“But let’s look at this in a more realistic way. What exactly does ‘doing without’ do for the content creator? How does “not purchasing” (or not having the option to purchase) the disputed content do anything for the creators? Because the bottom line in both scenarios is that $0 has made its way from the potential customers to the people desiring the income. If everyone just “does without,” how does this improve the situation for either the content creator or the customers? Once you’ve taken the piracy out of it, all you’ve got left is a set of lousy options that do nothing for everyone involved. If rights holders are happier merely saddling up their high horse and riding to the nearest moral peak, so be it. Riding that horse won’t make you any richer, though. All it does is further separate you from your potential income.”
Let Blockbuster, Borders and Tower Records be your model here. They told their customers that they would not provide the services these customers wanted. And for a while, everyone had to do without. But then someone else came along who could, and would, provide those services. Now, Netflix, Amazon and iTunes are raking it in. And Blockbuster, Borders and Tower Records have ‘saddled up [their] high horse[s] straight to bankruptcy.’
