Collapse of Complex Business

Interesting insights, and while I don't neccessarily agree with all of them, the idea that anyone can do things as they were done in the 20th century, or will be able to again soon, is foolish.

About 15 years ago, the supply part of media's supply-and-demand curve went parabolic [went up a lot, quickly], with a predictably inverse effect on price [went down]. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.

To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, It is not free, and is not going to be, Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact-we will have to pay them-but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

"Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that."

(from Clay Shirky).