2010 is shaping up to be a banner year for innovation, and everyone is telling us to look forward to new opportunities in the New Year but few are pointing to concrete examples of those opportunities.
The NTY today ran another story (Adding Fees and Fences) about the growing call from large media producers for pay-as-you-go content sites, these sites will charge a fixed or ala-carte amount for their newly designated premium media content. The usual suspects are falling in behind Rupert Murdoch’s crotchety dark-age leadership with cries that they are being ripped off.
One can’t help but remember the last decade of these same shouts from the likes of the RIAA, and even today the NYT dragged out the dinosaur argument that file swapping was the primary culprit that killed the music industry’s golden egg (shame on your NYT). Murdoch and his greed infested followers are opening the door for all small businesses and organizations to create new and exciting collaborations that will help to quickly fill this void and further send these fossils into the grave.
What this is really about is not what they would have you believe. News Corp and the other relics are struggling to hold on to power, the power to control content from start to finish and they stay awake at night worrying about competition. The titans like Murdoch are really monopolists who talk about the benefits of capitalism and competition while all the while doing there best to stifle it. There is nothing fair or balanced in an economic system that rewards those who practice the craft of monopoly while at the same time punishes innovators and entrepreneurs.
Small business and nonprofits can benefit mightily from the dinosaurs walling themselves off. Small business entrepreneurs can take the lead in creating alliances that create content and products, getting them to market faster and cheaper then the old guard could ever hope to. The water in the kettle is about to boil sounding the call to innovation and over the next couple of months I will share some collaboration ideas to help make these behemoths obsolete.
