I guess the comparable excess the information industry has is an excess of content. Who is ever going to read it all? We don’t know, but it gets produced nonetheless.

I find the thing that often holds us back from leaping forward is assumptions. We see ‘a’ anlongside ‘b’ and automatically believe that the two are joined for life.

In business we all too often see the package and miss the indivual parts that comprise it. People often can’t get it at first when we seperate out the all the parts and often bulke and say ‘you can’t do that’. They see it as one end to end process not many merely assembled one way.

When we reassemble and understand the parts better it often makes change easy.

In the Mid 90′s, I worked at Bell Labs. Your recollection is slightly off. Our worry was not about filling the pipes, although we wondered how that would happen. Our worry was mainly about the huge gap between the cost of provisioning long distance phone calls and the revenue they were generating. When it cost a fraction of a penny to carry a voice call, and typical charges were 10 cents- $1 per minute, how long would that revenue stream survive? There was no way you could charge for data what you could charge for voice, but there was still a lot of money to be made. So the result was a lot of energy put into protecting the long distance revenue stream.

The analogy to today is clear. Publishers are spending most of their energy trying to protect to print revenue stream, when it’s clear that a lot of money could be made on the digital channel with appropriate pricing.

In the end, it’s impossible to sustain a big gap between cost and price. Efforts to sustain the incumbent revenue will eventually lead to a collapse.

In telecom, it turned out that the RBOCs, the unsexy low-growth stepchildren of the Bell System ended up on top. They had the connections to the customer and the expensive physical plant. You must have advised them well, because they did quite well while AT&T, Sprint and MCI ran off a cliff.

In the Book ecosystem, the entities analogous to the RBOCs would be the distributors (Ingram, B&T) and the bricks and mortar chains. Interestingly, they’re the ones best placed to create the “direct connection” infrastructure that you suggest will require “reckless enthusiasm”. What is so reckless, exactly?

A couple of thoughts it has prompted:

–How can we improve our chances of taking the right reckless leaps? Two strategies come to mind: attention and humility. They go hand in hand. You can’t really see what’s happening if you think you already have it all figured out. And if you really are paying attention, it will be obvious to you that you don’t have it all figured out.

–An important part of this dynamic is how one reckless leap leads to another unanticipated reckless leap. We jumped from Gopher to Netscape because it had just become so darn hard to _see_ into the Internet. We have Google because it was so darn hard to _find_ what we were looking for, when the “Information Superhighway” (which implied on- and off-ramps, clear starting and ending points, from me to you and you to me) became a real Web. We owe all the exciting work now being done on semantics to the problem we have figuring out what all this stuff _is_. (Ditto for standards.) And do I need to mention that despite the initial wrongheaded expectation that advertising was going to pay for everything (the previous commenter, Tim O’Reilly, gave the most cogent analysis of this, especially for professional publishers, I’ve ever seen, at TOC a couple of years ago–his walk through the logic and the math was very illuminating), guess where Google has gotten all its billions?

Thanks again for a terrific post.

–Bill Kasdorf