business models

The media business used to be fairly simple. It operated on linear model, consisting of content, distribution and audience, with a small priesthood of publishers, producers and programing executives making editorial decisions for the rest of us. Stars were created by the choices they made.

When Lou Gerstner first arrived at IBM as CEO in 1993, he brought a gripe with him from his time running American Express, one of Big Blue’s largest customers. As he wrote in his memoir, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, it became central to his transformation of the company.

What?

I mean, what????

Seriously? Just last year two of my seven posts (yeah, didn’t do that well writing in my blog last year – but been working to remedy that by posting links to my other writings around the world – but I digress) were about digital transformation.

In Silicon Valley, the PayPal Mafia reigns supreme. So much so that it is hard to think of any successful technology startup in the last ten years—from Facebookand LinkedIn to YouTube and Yelp—that hasn’t been touched by it in some way.

At the early stages of the Serious Games movement, in many cases they were made available to users free of charge or distributed within the client organization. Serious Games used to lack the budgets of entertainment games, so producers usually did not develop their own game engines (which could cost upwards of $5 million and 3-5 years of time), but instead leased popular game engines for game play. 

If you want to produce content, you need to think like a publisher. After all, content isn’t an extension of marketing, it’s an extension of publishing. I constantly stress that point to my consulting clients and in articles like this one in Harvard Business Review.

Every great idea begins as a revelation. Yet when that flash of insight leads to action, it inevitably encounters the real world and that’s when hard lessons are learned. Adjustments have to be made and, with some luck, success can be achieved. But profitable models rarely come easy.

In the 1950’s, Haloid Corporation thought it had a winning product. Through some clever engineering, it had created new technology that was leaps and bound better than anything that had come before it. The only problem was that nobody wanted to buy it.