What is the messy media lifecycle?
Simon makes the case (well, a case) for “messy media”, saying that while the Economist, with its labelled and ring-bound view of the world, might not like it, it might just be the only way to survive in a messy online world.
I stopped trying to predict the future after I suggested to a friend that his crazy early dot.com idea wouldn’t take off (it was for an online auction site) but that doesn’t stop me wondering about it.
In particular, I wonder how a messy media company (in the discussion above, Yahoo) would evolve over the years. One great thing about messy media is that people can cobble together services very easily from several others — see what people have done with Google Maps, for instance. Another is that it gives us lots of things to try out to make our lives better. But the drawback is that so many services, built so quickly, cannot be evolved and integrated quickly and reliably. There are several consequences of this.
For one thing, it means the services that people rely on — those that are built on top of the messy media monoliths — will be unreliable. For another, it means the services themselves are either unreliable (because they’ve been created quickly) or not integrated with the rest of the media monolith’s empire (Simon illustrates this very clearly in his piece).
All this means that we consumers are going to encounter quite a lot of unreliable or unintegrated services. And quite how we react to this going to have repercussions on the media monoliths themselves, which in turn affects the economy and our society generally. We could choose to accept a life of enforced variety, as we move our RSS feeds, e-mail accounts, VoIP services, etc, from one supplier to another. That would mean lots of redundancies in the media monoliths as they close down underperforming divisions (and rehire for equally short-lived new ones). Or we might force them to fix and consolidate their services. That would mean long periods of stagnation as they try to integrate disparate divisions, with disparate technologies, using people who realise the exciting company they joined 12 months previously is starting to look a lot like to nasty old company they left to go there in the first place.
Most likely is a mix of both: a constantly changing business landscape, with large companies’ portfolios constantly changing month by month, looking only half the same as it did 12 months previously, while a toughened core struggles to pull in the few divisions it can keep hold of.
So messy media might be the future, but it could mean a disruptive future for all of us.
