What began as a series of inter-office trip reports inspired by the work of our bluegrass-playing IT guy Rich Stillman turns 25 years old this month. Given that the 20th anniversary issue was a proud-papa overview of greatest hits and this is likely the last of this run of 337 issues, I’ll reflect back on the newsletter rather on the world it reported.
The newsletter started life as research notes for the Wired for Profit multi-client consortium I ran for the Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation. When that program shut down in 1999 — people were too busy doing online commerce to come talk about it — the newsletter became Networked Commerce Update for a few years. Best I can tell, it took on the Early Indications title in May 2003. After I moved to Penn State, publication remained under my rather than the business school’s auspices. Many newsletters were conference reports, and I often cut-and-pasted a lot of statistics from a wide range of sources. Eventually the essay format took hold as conferences got less interesting and relevant.
I was reviewing books before 1997 and continued to do so here. Apart from Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma — which I mentioned often but never formally reviewed — it’s funny how short the shelf-life was of most of the books that were reviewed. I did try to assess what makes a great business book, and listed a handful of candidates, back in 2013. Of the list, I had reviewed only one — Cusumano and Gawer’s Platform Leadership — in the newsletter.
Speaking of books, there’s a telling relationship between the newsletter and my own publishing. The 2012 Wiley book — Information, Technology, and Innovation — drew heavily on past work. More recently, book-writing has slowed down the newsletter output: until about 2006, shortly after I moved to teach at Penn State, newsletters often came out twice a month. In 2018, when I was completing the 3D printing book, the newsletter missed several months entirely. The pattern also reversed: rather than using newsletter copy as book fodder, after 2012 I wrote the book copy first then summarized or riffed on that in the newsletter afterward. All the recent newsletter stuff about YouTube in 2019-22 will finally have its book version published next year. Newsletters have also been reprinted at Forbes, The Boston Globe, Investors’ Business Daily, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications that no longer exist.
The newsletter genre itself, along with so much in the tech sector, has come around in fashion. Just as cloud computing is a reincarnation of the ancient art of time-sharing, so too are newsletters now hotter than blogs (remember RSS?). There’s a lesson in there somewhere about the virtues of steadiness: stick with something long enough, whether bow ties, LP records, or handwritten thank-you notes, and eventually fashion will re-embrace you after years of being out of step.
What were the recurring themes (or rants, as some might say)? I was trained as a historian, so long arcs often drew my attention. This interest manifested itself in many newsletters noting elements of time, particularly crossover points: when did cable modems overtake dialup in the US? When did digital cameras outsell film? When did cellular adoption surpass wireline? More important than the “when” question was the issue of implications, which I spent a lot of time parsing. Some of these transitions were personalized, making the point that these momentous technology shifts are often invisible in the moment. When did you last have a newspaper delivered? Dial a rotary phone? Buy plane tickets through a travel agent? Wrestle with a CRT monitor?
Another recurring theme in the newsletters that I found myself confronting more systematically in the online video book is the notion of human scale. When LinkedIn and Facebook automate and amplify our human connections with unprecedented reach, what are the consequences — for mental health, for democracy, for fraudsters, for emotional intimacy? When hidden hikes, fishing holes, or beachfronts get exposed to millions via the web, nature proves fragile in the face of way-beyond-local traffic and the accompanying externalities. When TikTok/YouTube personalities develop massive, international fan bases with mistaken feelings of interpersonal proximity, why is anyone surprised when said personalities sometimes go off the rails.
In the 2001-2010 period, I made a lot of predictions. Several readers appreciated the subsequent scorecards in which I graded the previous year’s, or decade’s, efforts. (See examples here and here.) I won’t revisit those, and cannot remember making a conscious decision to stop that practice. The decline in predictions does coincide with increased focus on book-writing: titles came out in 2010 (2), 2012, and 2014. Looking back, the decline also coincides with a consolidation of the ad-supported software model and the lack of any big-news startups since 2009 or so when Airbnb and Uber came along. Cryptocurrency has never received much coverage here, and maybe time will show I should have paid more attention, but apart from that neighborhood, what noteworthy tech startups have launched in the last 10-12 years? How many people would clamor for Snowflake (2012) to be included, for example?
What were other areas of interest? Music is both a personal passion and an area of important business model change. Innovation as ideology, practice, and economic engine shows up with some regularity. The triangle of economics, organizations, and people, all connected via evolving technologies, gets a lot of attention. One frequent topic is the notion of infrastructure: if people can work from home via digital connections, what happens to the roads, housing stock, and airports? I first asked that question in March 2002 and returned to the idea of distributed work several times thereafter. Another theme relates to what a services-centric “digital economy” actually means. As we are seeing on a weekly basis, making things, whether vaccines, lithium batteries, or microprocessors, is still important for lots of reasons, and moving them to where they need to be is getting more attention than ever, post-Covid.
Regarding infrastructure, we still don’t know what a battery-accommodating power grid will look like. How will car-centric US cities make bicycle-commuting safe: many European cities weren’t built for cars in the first place, so reverting to pedal and foot traffic fits the architecture. (I’m excited to see the transition Paris is making, and the bike-centricity of the Netherlands.) Where will apartment-dwellers charge their cars without garage parking? Airports, for a variety of reasons, stopped working reliably for much of 2022. And so on.
Quick snippets from the early years before the newsletters were saved in the Blogspot archive:
-A conference speaker in 1998 asked “what would a VCR designed by Microsoft look like?”
-In 1999 the Iridium satellite phone was under-appreciated: 6/10 of a watt of transmitting power sent a signal 485 miles into the sky to intercept a satellite moving at 17,000 miles per hour. That’s non-trivial, but few people noticed, or cared.
-I first saw what became the ubiquitous and annoying Internet-connected gas pumps demonstrated in 1999.
-Customer acquisition at Petstore.com cost $300 per head in 2000. If said customer spent $30 a month, it would take five years for the business to break even, assuming extreme loyalty. How funders and management signed up for such a business remains puzzling.
-In 2002, Netflix added an east coast distribution center. Customers in the Boston-DC metroplex no longer had to wait a week or so between mailing a DVD — the format was still novel, having launched in 1997 — to Silicon Valley and getting the next one in the queue.
-I noted something called Amazon Web Services, not yet the cloud business at that point, in 2002.
-Keyhole (2002), later Google Earth, remains the best tech demo I’ve ever seen live.
-In 2003 a conference speaker argued that the “view source” command in early web browsers accelerated the adoption of the web by a significant margin, and I agree. There’s really nothing comparable that I can name.
Swag:
-One of my first tech t-shirts — from the Netscape Developers Conference — is still prized, if a bit rough around the edges.
-I still have my Digital Equipment AltaVista t-shirt after the guy in the booth told me it might be collectible. DEC shut the operations down a few months later.
-Nokia convened a bunch of us in Monterey in 2010 for an “Ideas Camp” that was a wonderful yet unproductive experience: Apple’s momentum was unstoppable. Still, I had never seen a portable sauna until that time, and I still have the Belgian Chimay beer goblets. My teenaged son also got a behind-the-scenes tour of Electronic Arts out of the connections I made there.
-General Magic was so far ahead of its time, but couldn’t get the execution right. Here’s a good documentary. I gave away the lovely sweatshirt that I outgrew — if I remember, the reception was on a boat and I had my palm read, rather too convincingly.
-A toy racing car is still on my bookshelf, a souvenir of the weekend I spent at the 24 Hours of Daytona, courtesy of a vendor.
What next?
As of May, I’ll be responsible for 35 mid-career doctoral students making their way through thesis-writing and -defending. Parents are getting older, as are adult offspring in a mixed household: family time is a new proposition at this stage. There may be a book project in the newsletter archive. And I may do occasional updates if the insights arrive and readership permits.
That’s all down the line. For now, it’s time to thank the many people — funders, readers, accomplices, many of you known only by email handle — who made the ride possible:
Tim Andrews
Bob Bauer
Lawrence Baxter
Stew Bloom
Gary Bolles
Al Boris
Geoff Cohen
Karina Funk
Denny Gioia
Ellen Glazerman
Lesley Livingstone
Tom McLaughlin
Chris Meyer
Andy Mulholland
Ralph Oliva
John Parkinson
Arvind Rangaswamy
Steve Sawyer
Chris Shipley
Tim Simcoe
Jamie Taylor
Richard Weddle
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