Discussed: daily media consumption, zettabytes, information, content,
The video in my previous post had me go back to a study that I remembered reading about how much “information” each American consumes on a single day. If you think that the amount is gargantuan, you are right. The number is 34 gigabytes and 100′000 words* a day, the digital equivalent I guess of 15 Big Macs with cheese and large fries. Something like that. Annually, it’s measured in a word that you may not yet, be familiar with, “zettabytes”. Those numbers come from a study released last year by the University of California in San Diego. And since they’re big, the authors kindly provide us with an nice table to size it all.
“Information” in this context needs to be qualified. “We defined “information” as flows of data delivered to people and we measured the bytes, words, and hours of consumer information ” write the authors.
And so this is the digital diet that is now our common lot in the developed world. (I suspect that the figures might not be that different in most G8 countries.) And I am tempted to say that the word “information” should actually be replaced by the word “content”. Content today is what people spend their time absorbing. It’s where they spend their time and how much time they spend watching, reading, “ingesting” flows. Content no longer implies “meaning” or “sense”. In this quantity, at warp speed, it is indeed just bytes. *We don’t read 100′000 words a day of course, we are bombarded, or immersed in 100′000 words a day. The graph below shows the “wordflow”.
This is what our connected homes have become. And our appetite doesn’t seem to be abating as accessing information and connecting to the “flows” becomes easier thru better technology and friendlier interfaces. The study estimates that overall, our information consumption has grown a steady 6% each year between 1980 and 2008, year of the study. We may even be oblivious to our technological environment. Again, an illustration from that study serves as a reminder:
I guess we better get used to the word “zettabyte”.
Books are for reading. Papers, magazines, the web are for browsing. Books are books, even on an e-reader. Reading a book is not reading a newspaper and is certainly not the same experience as browsing a web site. I have at all times between 10 and 25 open books. I love books. The pages of my books are black and white, mostly matte. With time they turn yellow. Sometimes I pick a book and read a few pages, sometimes, I finish a book in one sitting. I can’t be without books, I just can’t. A bed, a table, a chair, an armchair, a lamp and books are all I probably truly need. I always have books in my head: when I talk, sentences, quotes, ideas, words from books pop-up in my mind. There is no greater pleasure for me than to give a book, or to receive one. I asked for a Kindle at Christmas. It arrived in its unsophisticated brown box. I charged it, turned it on and bought a few books. At the beginning, the cohabitation was uneasy between my white Kindle and my books. Kindle or hardcover? I couldn’t decide, for a few days I went back and forth between the two. I wanted to finish the book I was reading but I wanted to “play” with my Kindle. Then I decided to buy the Kindle edition of the book I was reading. I finished reading it on my Kindle, while the hardcover edition looked suddenly like a discarded useless object.
Over the next few days, I solely read on my Kindle. I bought a few books, went from one to another. Read them all.I went away to visit friends for a couple of days. With all my books on my Kindle, nicely nestled on top of the car’s dashboard. I didn’t take my laptop with me. Absolute bliss. I was able to carry all I needed with me. Yet a few days later, I forgot my Kindle on the train. I don’t think I ever forgot a book anywhere. But my brand new Kindle yes. I did everything I could to get it back, posted a notice on the train company’s website. For several days I hoped that someone might find it, bring it back to the station. I checked to see if anybody had bought a book, a proof of usage. Then I got a message from the rail company that, 15 days having passed, it was unlikely that I would ever get it back.
I decided to wait for the iPad before replacing my Kindle. Had all my electronic books transferred to my iPhone. It became a long wait as I missed my Kindle. Then the iPad was unveiled. Just as expected, once again Apple managed to push the envelope, changing the way we interact with our machines. But for me, it is clear that, as an hybrid, the iPad will drive you to constant distraction. You will be checking email, and following RSS feeds, and loose yourself while surfing. When the Kindle came out, Steve Jobs said that he doubted it would succeed because “people don’t read any more”. Jobs’ belief shows on the iPad. This is very simple: the iPad is the epitome of the attention deficit terminal. It is strong on graphics, pictures, videos and photos. But it pays only lip service to reading. Yes, the virtual bookstore is cool. But reading and multitasking are probably incompatible. The wait for the iPad is over. Good, for I know now that I will replace my Kindle with a Kindle.
Après une première distinction au Mipcom de Cannes dans la catégorie “Best News for Mobile” , Anyscreen et nanotv ont reçu mercredi à Paris l’award du Best Sport News” décernée lors des “European Mobile Days “. Bien que développé en 2005 par Anyscreen, soit avant la révolution de l’iPhone, les membres du jurys ont salué le fait que nanotv et la séquence primée représentaient l’exemple type d’un produit véritablement conçu pour le téléphone mobile plutôt que simplement adapté. Les séquences sportives de nanotv ont été réalisées avec la technologie de traitement de l’image de la société fribourgeoise Dartfish. 165 productions étaient en compétition cette année. Le jury était composé de professionnels de la branche et de l’industrie.
After a “Best News For Mobile ” award at the 2005 Mipcom Festival in Cannes, Anyscreen and nanotv were awarded the “Best Sports News” award at the “European Mobile Days” in Paris. Conceived before the iPhone as a mobile news channel in 2005, nanotv was available on Swisscom’s Replay TV VOD offer in Switzerland. The jury saluted the fact that nanotv was an example of content specially conceived for a small mobile screen. 165 entries were in competition at the two-days long event.
Jean-Mare Messier is facing a jury in New York. The dot.com era of tech/media giant mergers that were hard to understand when first announced and turned out to prove right the common man sense of skepticism a few years later seems to be over. But historical accounts of mega business deal make for terrific reading. Particularly when the main players accept to be totally candid about it. From the New York Times, this one about the 2001 AOL – Time Warner is a must read. In Retrospect – Executives on How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong – NYTimes.com.
This is not about the Google Nexus One Android powered phone. This is about business and economics. My question is simple: how will Google fare when it’s straying away from its core business? When Apple went from the computer sector into the music business with the iPod and iTunes, then jumped happily and successfully into the smartphone field, it precisely did not abandon its core business. It did the exact opposite and applied a tested recipe to another sector. The value proposition and the appeal stayed the same: the guarantee of a fabulous user experience through technological prowess and superior design. Let’s accept it, Apple has, quite simply, fundamentally altered our perception and our acceptance of what I want to call “the machine”. It has done it by eradicating the distance between ourselves and our tools. Using an iPhone for the first time feels as simple and playful as drawing a funny face on a foggy window. No learning curve, no need for a user manual. Apple’s interfaces are extremely powerful metaphors: how could a virtual music collection NOT look like iTunes? How could the extension of my palm, a mouse, NOT look like a polished sculpture rather than a contraption? End of necessary digression and back to the Nexus One.
Google’s core business is the search/advertisment business thanks to a complete and so far unchallenged mastery of superior algorithms. Until now, every single application or service developed by Google has been built on that, powerful information processing and integration. Every time Google has tried something else, it has been met with mixed results. Sometimes even when staying within its core business, Google has been unsuccessful. Remember Google Video? Well, it bombed. Until Google bought YouTube. And if YouTube is a success, it is largely due to the fact that Google has played sugar daddy by pumping millions into it. Generated by what business? You guessed it: its core business, the search/advertisement business.
The digital ecosystem is going mobile. The desire for mobility need not be created. To this extent, Google thought it probably had to venture outside of the computer screen. But my basic question remains: what for? As a consumer, what is the real benefit to me of the Nexus vs. the iPhone or the BlackBerry. Will my search experience be enhanced? Nope. Is Android a superior operating system. Not sure when I read the reviews. Might Google have gone into that business out of arrogance and pure hubris? Might the”don’t be evil” company be suddenly blinded by its success and think it has become invincible?
Discussed: whats is a “media mogul, competitive advantages and/or barriers to entry, business models, fallacies
“Scale, customer captivity, cost and government protection.” According to Knee and his co-authors, those are the four fundamental ingredients necessary to maintain a competitive advantage in any industry. That includes the media. The “curse” they refer to in the title of their book “The Curse of the Mogul” is the top-guns’ media people’ blindness to this basic economic axiom. For the authors, the moguls are guilty of having mistakenly believed that the growth of the net for instance would automatically mean additional revenues and compensate for the losses of revenues incurred on the traditional side of their business. Quite obviously, you might be forgiven, as a print-press mogul, to have initially believed that the Internet offers vast opportunities in the form of expanding markets and above all in declining distribution costs. But it has often proved to be a mirage, and a very costly one at that. The “curse”. If the press and the media are in such dire financial straits today, the authors convincingly argue, it is because their shortsightedness was made even more severe by their arrogance and their irrational and risky behavior. Think of the billions invested in phony ventures and inoperable “synergies”. Think, as an example familiar in Europe of Jean-Marie Messier who, besides his megalomania, could honestly pretend and convince his investors that it was the business of a utility company to expand into media!
The picture is not pretty and the authors find no extenuating circumstances for the “bad moguls” they portray in their book. They also talk about some brilliant ones, Michael Bloomberg for one, who before being elected Mayor of New York built an empire in the financial information sector by being a savvy businessman, i.e a by understanding how competitive advantages are built. This is what Warren Buffet calls “constantly digging a moat around your business”.
So, yes the picture is bleak, we have ample evidence to prove it. Yet the author do not conclude that “old-media” is doomed. Incidentally, they correctly argue that the distinction between “old” and “new” should be forever forgotten and be replaced by the question of knowing if , as a business, you are capable of digging the moat. The challenge is tall in the digital ecosystem as the net primary impact on businesses has been to dramatically lowering barriers to entry and where “customer captivity” might actually be more important than ” deep pockets ” But on the other end , never ever have we consumed more media than today. May the best moat digger win!
Discussed: Google, new and old media , boning a duck, hard facts not spin, moguls, business models
The following scene is by now fairly well known. It was recently excerpted in the New Yorker and has now been nicely built in writer Ken Auletta’s “ Googled ” book.
It goes as follows: back in 2003, Mel Karmazin, Viacom’s CEO, is trying to explain to the Google founders how advertising works in television. By and large, it’s fairly simple: backed by the ratings collected twice a year during a couple of weeks called the “sweeps”, you tell your advertiser that his commercial his going to be seen by x – number of people in prime – time. If he wants the slot, he’ll have to shell out a few millions dollars. Will he ever know precisely how many people have actually seen the commercial? For how long? No, admits Karmazin, but this is precisely the name of the game. And it has worked this way since the very beginning of television, or at least since P&G started advertising on electronic media and paying for the “soap operas”.
Born challengers of the established order, both Sergey Brin and Larry Page have no qualms about showing Karmazin how fundamentally flawed, unethical and above all inefficient they believe the model to be. For Google operates precisely on the very opposite model. When you advertise on Google, or simply on the net, you know exactly what you are getting. You will know how many people watch your ad, how many people clicked on it, how many people transacted based on the add. High-tech vs. high-touch, algorithms and hard evidence vs. approximation and spin. As Brin and Page are finishing their explanation, Karmazin blurts out: “You’re fucking with the magic!”
The scene and the words are worth recounting here as they are emblematic and illustrative of exactly what the authors of “The Curse of the Mogul” are strongly contemptuous in the (old)-media business. Their contempt is particularly directed at the people at the top, the moguls of the book and at all the toadies around them. But Jonathan Knee and his two co-authors have not penned “une comédie humaine”. No, those three media economists have written an book about the economy of the media. In that sense “The Curse of the Mogul” might be one of the most illuminating book about the media in years for they resist the temptation to succumbing to the idea that those huge companies should be scrutinized and analyzed differently than say, the car industry. As a matter of fact, they very often compare examples of what as happened in other industries to make a point or drive it home.
In doing so, the book debunks quite a few myths, the biggest one certainly being that it is the rise of the Internet that might be the single most important reason for the downfall of the newspapers. Knee and his colleagues show quite clearly that the U.S media conglomerates were underperforming already before the Internet. Obviously, the case got worse because of the disruptive power of the net, but equally because of the blindness – if not downright incompetence – of the moguls, so used to deal in “ magic “ that they never quite could understand the perfect storm that was building around them. The authors do not hesitate to convict the mogul of using “sham” attitudes to lure investors as opposed to what ought to be sound economics and good business.
Reading this book is not unlike watching Meryl Streep bone a duck in “Julie and Julia” The film and the book came out at about the same time and if you have seen it, you know what I am talking about. Julia Child takes a duck, bones it, and then saws it back together with the stuffing made with the meat. Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald and Ava Seave, the three co-authors work with the same determination to remove the phoniness from within the object of their analysis.
This is what serendipity is all about: surfing the net, browsing in a bookstore and simply discovering the work of someone you didn’t know about. Today, the painter Marlène Dumas.
Happy New Year! And please be aware that 2010 is not “two-thousand and ten”. I stood to be corrected so now you know, thanks to the good folks at twentynot2000.com. All the best!
