George Gilder promised and heralded it; the authors of "Blown to Bits" and "The Innovators Dilemma" warned about it close to ten years ago now; Chris Anderson has explained it in "The Long Tail" and now in "Free:" When the cost of a product and service decline rapidly, a couple of things are pretty likely to happen: new players will enter the market, unburdened by legacy cost structures and business practices (including past success); prices will fall, incumbents will suffer, and new business models will emerge. Nowhere has this been more dramatic and public than in the media industries I've worked in and around for almost all of my careers: books, music and movie delivery (MTV, Showtime, Movie Channel); consumer electronics (remember the Sony Walkman?); subscription newsletter; newspapers... Two items today are only the most recent among many to address this: Jeremiah Owyang's commentary on the first Cisco Eos contract with the big Hollywood media brands: http://bit.ly/ynaV3 and the European Union's large survey and report that, among other things, notes that P2P technology is not the reason media companies have lost sales. As I tweeted a few minutes ago, it's the business model, stupid (thanks to James Carville for the appropriation).
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