The move to mobile, the rise of apps, the battles for platform domination, the coming of the iPad, and of course all the experiments with trying to get paid for producing quality content.

I have posted 105 times and it has been fun. But not anymore. I will stop writing for publishing and media people about the events happening around them, in the hope they will rethink their business strategy and start acting. 

It’s time to move on, since the world moves on as well. And fast it does.

When I started this blog, I zoomed in on myopia. Why is it we do not see and understand the developments around us? I chose the world of, what one may call, New Media Dynamics. A fast paced world. Especially nowadays.

But myopia is certainly not limited to media. In these extraordinary days it is all around us. Politicians who refuse to think about the future. Bankers who keep acting like they own the place. Shifts in power from the West to the East.  There are a lot of developments far more interesting then the myopia of media people.

There is a pressing question to explore: what’s the connection between the rapid rise of hyperconnectivity and the collapse of the old ways of thinking and planning we can see everywhere?  I need to dive into that matter.

That’s why I changed the name of this blog into (Media) Myopia.

Starting today I will try to blog at least once a week.

From today I will shift my focus to other issues as well. To name just a few:

• Big Data, as the driver of change.
• Black Swans, being these things and events we humans can not see and anticipate, it seems.
• Complexity, of which there is far too much.
• Simplex sigillum veri (who came up with this one?)

In Real Life I am working with a great team to launch a completely new approach to handle disparate data. We have gone back to the pre PC era and picked up some neat ideas about tackling the issue of information overload.

I hadn’t visited the ‘aire naturelle’ for 5 years. The only thing he added in these 5 years were two extra sockets near the fridge. They were all used to recharge iphones and iPads. And there was a waiting list.

I spoke with a man with an iPad, who told me he drove every morning to a nearby village to plug in and check the news and his mail. Screens are everywhere. Access as well. Even in the middle of nowhere (in Europe, that is).

I’m happy to say I did not carry a screen. Even more happier to say I did not read one single newspaper. Instead I read a few books. Very handy mobile media, I must say. I read a novel about the magic of books and Barcelona, finally finished ‘Outliers’ and worked my way through Friedman’s Green Bible.

And I had plenty of time to think. I came to feel, understand and notice the effect of media usage. Instead of browsing and flipping from blogs to posts and tweets, I actually enjoyed the time to reflect.

On page 403 John Sculley tried to look into the future:

‘A future-generation Macintosh, which we should have early in the twenty-first century, might well be a wonderful fantasy machine called the Knowledge Navigator, a discoverer of worlds, a tool as galvanizing as the printing press. Individuals could use it to drive through libraries, museums, databases, or institutional archives. This tool wouldn’t just take you to the doorstep of these great resources as sophisticated computers do now; it would invite you deep inside its secrets, interpreting and explaining -converting vast quantities of information into personalized and understandable knowledge.’

Some people at the company came up with a video. They were inspired by the Dynabook concept, created by Alan Kay in 1968. The Knowledge Navigator looked like this:

The video can be found here.

John left and Steve came back.

And now we all have and/or want an ipod, iphone and iPad.

It indeed has been an epic voyage, as the word odyssey came to refer to.

Boundaries blurred, blur and will keep blurring.

IT companies are fighting for positions as Media powerhouses. And as things look now, some of them are quite successful, especially Apple and Google, who yesterday changed places as ‘most wanted worldwide brand’.

But things move quickly. Today Microsoft acquired Skype for a hefty fee. In cash, one might add.

Most commentators reacted stunned. Why buy Skype? Skype may have 663.000.000 active members, only 8.800.000 actually pay. And a turnover of 860.000.000 is not that big, is it? It’s only about a 100$ per paying member. So they say.

But let us look at this big news from a different perspective. Imagine that it is possible to double the amount of payments. Imagine it is possible to double the amount of users that actually pay. Then it becomes a no brainer.

Look at this strategic move from another different angle: strategy.

It becomes clear this is a perfect move again. Microsoft is already moving to the clouds. Microsoft just did a deal with Nokia. Microsoft is doing a public beta with Office 365. Microsoft is already one of the fastest growing telephone services companies in the world.  Microsoft has quite an installed base in the business world.

And last but not least the real power of Microsoft is  the strong ties with developers, reaching hundreds of millions of businesses all around the globe.

Microsoft is moving into the business of making phone calls. Phones, not media.

But what are phones really these days?

One of the intriguing statements Seth made was about adding multimedia to books.

He called this a cul-de-sac.

In his view it will become a crying game. He compared the days publishers produced cd-roms with Vietnam. He mentioned several publishers going nearly broke.

In Seth’s opinion a book is written by one person and at some point the product is finished.

Multi Media projects are produced by lots of people. Being software projects they are never finished.

I found this quite interesting, even a bit alarming. I had the idea that adding multimedia would change the way we read. Maybe it’s not books as such that need a change, maybe it will be magazine like products. Maybe only textbooks will turn into multimedia.

Anyway: the interview is great. Take the time and listen.

Let’s look at the three sectors, usually considered to be at the center of these digital waves of change.

The smartphones and tablets are taking over all IT related industries. Computers basicly just left the building and are on the move. Software will turn into a service more rapidly soon, certainly when Office 365 will go out of public beta.

Telco’s are struggling. Landlines are out. Mobile became texting. Who could have imagined people writing on these things, since they were supposed to talk through them. The industry did not see smartphones coming. Their solution was to sell  internet bundles, but their customers started to use these bundles to acces free services. Why pay to call, if you can send a message for free?

Publishers are starting to realize they can no longer wait to change. Publishers have been neglecting All Things Digital too long. Change was something others would have to undertake, after the publishers themselves retired. A book is a book, you know. Yeah, and a newspaper a newspaper, right? A few years ago publishers had worries and money. Now it’s panic while they are almost broke.

In the midst of all these waves of change it is easy to focus too much on details. We tend to zoom in. But we need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. The bigger picture in the world of business still is the simple fact that all links in the chain that do not add value, will disappear. Vanish. Evaporate. Fade out.

The middleman is under attack.

Take a look at your market. Zoom in on the chains. Which chain is only an intermediary?

Zoom out on the basic needs of customers. What is it they want?

Zoom in, zoom out!

Myopia is all about forgetting the frames in our minds. We see what we want to see. We don’t see, what’s blocked out. We tend to think about ourselves and the things we think are important. We look from the inside out and we forget we have to look from the outside in.

Even when we are convinced of the existence of this phenomenon, we keep forgetting we suffer from myopia ourselves.

In trying to point my clients towards the rapid changes and shifts in the digital media landscape, I also forget to look at other changes. And these changes might be even more fundamental.

Let’s look at a few very recent ones:

• In Finland a new party popped up this weekend and one of their main goals is to stop support of troubled countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal.
• The German Landesbanken have been lending enormous amounts of euros to these troubled countries.
• If these already troubled countries fail, the Landesbanken will have quite a problem.
• After Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Portugal, who will be next?

As always it is not technology itself, that will determine what will happen. It is what people want and people do. How will these crises affect the minds, ideas and plans of our clients, bosses, business partners?

As the picture tells us, we are already well on our way to the future.

But where is this road we’re on leading us?

What is our direction?

And if we don’t like that, which exit do we have to take?

So I started touring publishers of books covering the arts, photography, design, architecture, history. I was rather stunned to notice these conversations turned out to be flashbacks.

I reexperienced earlier conversations during the rise of web 1.0 with record company management people.

There was, as we now are used to notice, ‘no real sense of urgency’. Of course it could be explained by the fact that all of these publishers were based in a very small country, called The Netherlands, but one would expect these professionals at least to be familiair with concepts like ‘desintermediation’, ‘e-books’, ‘Google’ or ‘ecommerce’. To my surprise they were not. And if they were, they were convinced that it would take years to develop and mature.

This year I started talks with museums to publish ibooks ourselves, without the publishers, since they were the ones that would be desintermediated. In preparation of making a shortlist for ibooks, I came upon art books, already available on iphone, iPad and iTouch. The price for a neat little handy booklet on Van Gogh was $ 1.99.  At least 50 or so well known painters were published as well for the same price.

This brings me to my point. As The Daily set the price for a daily on the iPad, this publisher set the price for nice, neat, little ibooks on painters.

Publishers and for that matter museums will have a very, very hard time to beat this price.

But for consumers, all over the world, the price sure is right.

Again.

This time I wanted to take some time and think.

I was overwhelmed by the introduction of the Harry Potter newspaper, as Rupert Murdoch used to call it. Not because this bold move was unexpected, but because of the pricing strategy. A dollar a week is hard to beat. The Daily cornered the market. Who will enter next?

Market acceptance does not seem to be very positive. It’s hard to find trustworthy data and my first impressions are therefore just that and nothing more. But the general idea points towards the conclusion that The Daily is not a huge hit. Yet, one has to add.

However.

The price is still very, very hard to beat.

By claiming land on this new frontier in the Media Wild West, competitors are hindered or even prohibited to join the Gold Rush.

I’m afraid.

First and foremost it’s price and the strategy behind it. Less than a dollar a week. Nobody expected this to happen. A dollar per issue was the general expectation. This price defines the game for tablet publishing and will be hard to ignore, because consumers will come to see it as the de facto standard. Mr. Murdoch just put another wall on his content, one might say.

The Daily is iPad only. My guess is that web access will dry up, at least after the two weeks of free trials. How this will play out, is hard to predict.

One can argue that this move is just one in a series of well planned and executed movements to work towards a model for paid content. Mr. Murdoch spoke many times on the unsustainable position of publishers when they keep giving away their product for free. And, at least in my humble opinion, right so. High Quality Content is difficult to produce and the makers of  creative works should be compensated.

But one can also argue that the web community will  find ways to hack the content anyway or that news is freely available on the web and therefore there is no need at all for paid dailies. And then there is the broad discussion on the nature of the web (open or closed) and even the predictions on the death of the web. Apps rule, so to speak.

We will see. The user will decide.

One very important rule in launching a new product or service, however comes to my mind. A client of mine always used to tell his people that a new thing has to be faster, better, easier and cheaper than the existing offerings. Seen from this perspective I think it will be Game, Set and Match.