The History of the Future: IP and CC, IT, PC, and CE
Predicting Information Technology
Information (PC, IT) and entertainment technology (CE), and to a lesser extent communications (telecom, teleconferencing, correspondence) and creative technologies (authoring, composing, photographing, designing, drawing, performance, recording) impact the flow of copyrighted content (IP) and creative commons (CC) content. No one responsible for content commerce can ignore how, when, and by whom these technologies will be deployed, for they do so at their competitive peril.
Technology and its effective implementation is as effective a weapon in the content marketing arsenal as the content itself (as blasphemous as that sounds coming from a musician). Yet it will be ignored until it is too late, mismanaged for some time after that, and foolishly overcompensated to catch up to the rapidly departing train, which may itself be an illusion.
To raise the bar even higher, the technology vendors themselves do not make it easy. The relationship can border on adversarial as the technologists think up ever more appealing gadgets for separating content from payment mechanisms. To some content providers it appears that to partner with technology vendors means to donate assets as loss leaders to whet the appetite of the consumer to misappropriate the content further. The most demanding, inscrutable, and, ultimately in the future, lucrative demographic is the same one which has the most technological sophistication and time dangerously mixed with the least loyalty and cash flow.
It’s enough to make you want to cash in your leveraged account on that 9th hole condo in Boca.
But every single has a B side.
The complexity of managing commercial technology development in the business world today is staggering. The changes the Internet has made in the last 5 years alone on the supply chain are mind blowing. Migration of competition in the global technology business is fast-paced, the rules of competition are brutal, money and stock markets are as hard to finesse as a stampeding herd of mastodons and regulatory hurdles are inflating legal expenses to staggering proportions.
The science of retail distribution, advertising, and marketing had to be reinvented for the information age, where relationship marketing, internet commerce, and online distribution rose to the forefront. Push models are challenged by pull models, big boxes steamroll boutiques, and service is handled by people with fake Western names in opposing time zones.
R&D, the once dignified and powerful way for technology leaders to provide for the present and the future, has been sidestepped as fast as a Monsanto hybrid seed harvest by assemblers foreign and domestic, and the patent royalty system is being crushed under its own weight with the litigious backlash of overregulation. Miss the cycle by a year either way and somebody else is running the patent pool for the next generation and you are scrambling to add features.
When everything does come together, you have a great technology, you perfect it. scale it, rally the vendor community around it, build the infrastructure and take it to the content providers on a silver platter, they don’t take your phone calls. And these were the same guys who just made a mind-blowing fortune on the last technology you made for their profit taking pleasure.
It’s enough to make you want to trade in your Benz for a downpayment on that Bonzai Pipeline beach house.
What are the aspects of technology you can solve for, and what are totally unpredictable? Industrial markets are more rational, revolving around what makes or saves money. Consumer markets are warped by fashion, self-expression, and counter-trends. How can content owners differentiate the trends that are necessary to keep a finger on the pulse of and those in which you have to be directly involved? How do technology providers balance the disclosure downside of patents and standards with the political risks of playing close to the vest?
In the Infotechnomics blog, we’ll be looking at what planning tools, purchased data, and techniques successful organizations use to forecast technology, and discussing them in a new series called the History of the Future :: IP and CC, IT, PC, and CE.
posted by julia b schwerin