Dec
28
Some books that excite the public don’t excite me.
“The Closing of the American Mind” lost persuasive traction after about two chapters, and “The World is Flat” was little more than Cliff’s Notes for people who haven’t read newspapers in years.
But “Freakonomics” was fascinating and I hope for more from fresh-minded economist-author Steve Levitt. He thinks of ways to measure the veracity of your suspicions about the behavior of others.
And my thinking has been affected for more than 20 years by “Megatrends.” John Naisbitt’s 1982 bestseller foretold many of today’s defining conditions, but some of his megatrends were more than megatrends – they were observations about the human condition.
Chief among them: high tech vs. high touch.
Naisbitt noticed that people love new technology but they also love the good, old-fashioned human touch, and there seems to be a need to balance the two, because now and then consumers seem to require a pause in their acquisition of new tech, and when they do the next big thing will sell poorly, no matter what it is.
Naisbitt cited Beta video as an example; almost no one was interested in going to the trouble of switching to a measurably superior format, and diehards eventually forsook beta video recorders over lack of choice in tapes to play on them.
A few years later it happened again in the world of consumer electronics, when RDAT failed to catch hold with consumers and instead found its niche as a professional recording device, especially for long-form airchecks.
The dotcom boom saw many fine ideas fizzle for no particular reasons unless you can imagine millions of websurfers eagerly learning several new applications until they suffer education fatigue and reject the next offering out of hand.
Wal-Mart this week quietly killed its online video purchase service after Hewlett-Packard declined to support its own technology any longer. Wal-Mart chose not to seek another provider.
But Chad Ho (Damien, 1990), senior VP for Hulu.com, who appeared Friday morning on “Sunrise,” says Hulu already has hundreds of thousands of betausers for its free online video service.
“The key is the business model,” he said. “We don’t charge. We’ll make our money from advertising.”
Content is king, we sometimes hear, and this service is an alliance of NBC and Fox.
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