The slow death of mass media and the lesson for mobile operators

The Economist, 23-29 April 2005, p. 59: "... news providers ... had better get web-savvy, stop lecturing their audiences, become places for conversation and destinations where bloggers and podcasters congregate to engage ... in more extended discussions". Who says so? Mr. Rupert Murdoch, the mass media magnate. This article is telling of the slow death of hub-and-spoke (mass) media such as newspapers and television, but this is a discussion for a different blog.

Interestingly, mobile operators take an equivalent perspective on the future of value added mobile services. They throw money developing hub-and-spoke services, namely server downloads (ringtones, music, games, video, TV, etc.). And they expect to see their markets grow as fast as nothing before. Is this a smart strategy?

Take the Internet and the Web as examples. The Internet was around for about 30 years before Tim Berners Lee brought us html and Mosaic in 1992. Until then the Internet was small and unknown and dominated by hierarchical and generally controlled information structures. What fuelled its explosion thenafter? I'd say it was the personal web pages. The technology is easy and anyone can have a go at presenting something (expressing himself) to the world, at zero or very low cost. Do you remember Yahoo when it was the personal page of a couple of guys at Stanford? I do. My own page at the time wasn't quite as popular!

Innovation on the web did not come from a few wise companies down to millions of stupid users. It was the result of millions of brains trying it out. Some good did come out. It seems to me that the few mobile operators today are treating their customers as brainless minions who ought to buy whatever expensive and useless stuff their marketing and R&D departments come up with. It seems to me that giving mobile users the tools to present their own content in their own ways (to express themselves creatively) at zero or low cost would be a much more effective growth strategy. Evidently, the revenue models in this case are not as clear. But it is blatantly short-sighted to use this excuse for persisting with paleolithic hub-and-spoke business models.