Jeff Jarvis offers a provocative response to the news that AT&T is negotiating a $65 bil. acquisition of BellSouth. His post seems worthy of a thoughtful read, whether you agree with him or not. Time will tell the extent to which he’s right or wrong.
[C]onsolidation these days — when small is the new big — is about dinosaurs huddling against the cold, about Gulliver losing out to all those damned Lilliputans. Distribution is not king; in fact, it’s a rotten business. Content is not king; hear the whining from that end of the world. The scarcity economy is over. Openness kills monopolies. Don’t congratulate AT&T. Pity them.
The new, small companies do to some extent, for now, succeed on the backs of the big companies — pointing to their reporting, using their wires. But the big, old companies just don’t understand that the new, small companies really succeed not because they piggyback but because they empower.
Oh, the big, old companies will still reflexively try to get in the way. That’s all they know how to do. They will try to restrict what we can do on “their” wires with “their” information. They will try to recruit stupid government regulators to conspire and help them. We, the people, have to think five steps ahead of them and organize all our little pieces of ropes and pegs to tie them down. But we will. It’s inevitable.
The last huge merger in telecom…is the best indication that the telecom giants are falling. Thanks to Apple and TiVo giving entertainment addresses we can get to around the one official wire into our homes, expect the same to happen with the cable business. When I said that in the hall at OPA [Online Publishers Association], some folks protested that cable still has good cash flow. But I replied, beware the cash cow in the coal mine. There’s no growth there. And thanks to no end of empowering tools…the media companies that tried to get in the way between us and information and each other will also consolidate and then shrink unless they learn to empower us. We are witnessing the supernova of bigness.
Mitch Shapiro at 3:47 PM|Comments(0)
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