Explorations of the Inevitable – Part II

3) The networked digital delivery of all media, especially including newspapers.

This is a big topic and dear to my heart, so I’ve dedicated an entire post to this one.

Regardless of what anyone might think about the ongoing need for paper delivery, the simple cost of physical distribution of media versus networked delivery is a powerful and inexorable economic pressure.

We need to face the fact that the age of paper delivery of information is coming to an end not only due to cultural and social trends and a shift in generational attitudes, but also simply due to the rising costs of fuel, paper and ink.

Publishing content once to a web server, and then buying bandwidth on demand, is always going to be cheaper than printing on paper and driving that paper around.

What we currently have are legacy industries trying desperately to hang onto their old business model while struggling to find a new business model fast enough to save their brands from extinction.

This is the telegraph trying to compete with the telephone. It happens for a little while. And then everybody wonders why it happened at all.

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Explorations of the Inevitable – Part I

As an active entrepreneur and investor, from time to time I step back and review the meta-trends that will drive entrepreneurial success in the near future.

There are certain inexorable trends that drive social and economic change, and those are the trends that we must remain aware of as we evaluate and develop new ventures.

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