Loading...
Symbols:
Authors:

Microsoft's Ballmer Kills Print

by: Jeff Jarvis June 06, 2008 | about stocks: BLC / GCI / JRC / JRN / LEE / MEG / MNI / MSFT / NWS / NYT / SSP / WPO    

Jeff Jarvis

About this author:
Become a Contributor Submit an Article
  • Font Size:
  • Print

In an interview with the Washington Post, Steve Ballmer goes a bit farther than even I would go killing print. But that’s the problem; that’s the way print people look at it. What he’s really saying is that delivery over IP will have so much greater advantage over delivery via one-way media. Why? Interaction. He’s right.

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

Yeah. If it’s 14 or if it’s 8, it’s immaterial to my fundamental point. ... If we want TV to be more interactive, you’ll deliver it over an IP network. I mean, it’s sort of funny today. My son will stay up all night basically playing Xbox Live with friends that are in various parts of the world, and yet I can’t sit there in front of the TV and have the same kind of a social interaction around my favorite basketball game or golf match. It’s just because one of these things is delivered over an IP network and the other is not. ...

Also in the world of 10 years from now, there are going to be far more producers of content than exist today. We’ve already started to see that certainly in the online world, but we’ve just scratched the surface. ... I always take my favorite case: I grew up in Detroit. I went to a place called Detroit Country Day School. They’ve got a great basketball team. Why can’t I sit in front of my television and watch the Country Day basketball game when I know darn well it’s being video-recorded at all times? It’s there. It’s just not easy to navigate to.

 

In this video, he also talks about the future of advertising. Ballmer argues that it will be hard to distinguish between communication and entertainment and that advertising, commerce, and content will all blend.

Related Articles

This article has 4 comments:

  •  
    Jun 06 07:15 PM
    Steve Ballmer is self-serving in saying what he does, but Jeff Jarvis and the other media hacks are simply gullible in re-iterating the received wisdom that newspapers and magazines will simply disappear in X years. I would pay three times the current cost of a newspaper so that I can carry on reading it in bed on a Saturday morning. I am sorry, but perching a laptop in bed with the battery pack scorching my abdomen just does not cut it. There must be millions of people like me. Maybe newspapers and magazines will become niche products, but to say they will disappear is utter bunk. Now if only we could make computers, cellphones and PDAs disappear and go back to the way we were in less stressful times...
    Reply
  •  
    Jun 06 07:20 PM
    As an aside comment, I remember all the talk about the "paperless" office back in 1984. Are they paperless today, nearly a quarter century later? I thought not.
    Reply
  •  
    Jun 07 01:30 PM
    Ballmer's vision of the printed word only reflects the mindset of someone deluded enough to want to buy Yahoo.....(Yahoo is a backwards-thinking corporate mess only concerned with bonuses and corporat peck order squabbling, as anyone knowing anyone who has worked there is totally aware)...
    sure there will be a fallout in the printed world.....and I suspect there will be a lot more pictures and fewer words as digital cameras make pictures cheaper and decline in education and demand for anything more than sound bite makes serious journalism scarcer....even now, photography has been (with few exceptions)turning into the sorting of stochastic images as opposed to the clarity and thoughtful selectivity demanded by the slower and far more expensive constraints imposed by the halide image as practiced by Eisenstadt, Cartier-Bresson, David Douglas Duncan, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and their generation and forbears..although the net is a truly wonderful development in the advancement of communication and information distribution, it has not really found a replacement for the photojournalism lost with LIFE magazine, and is not inherently capable of doing so...fundamentally the intrinsic characteristics of what might be termed spirit and soul of the net is not of the same cloth as of the printed word.....
    It is a tragic loss to print that newspapers no longer can (or have not yet learned to) generate the resources absolutely necessary to support the extensive research staff needed to produce thought provoking reflective journalism..at some point, hopefully as soon as possible, there be a backlash to mass shallowness, (don't hold your breath quite yet) and there will be a stable niche for thoughtful printed word....
    The same phemomenon as newspapers are experiencing has already happened in the world of science--two generations ago primary scientific literature consisted of books by a single author (possibly with one or two close collaborators) who really understood, and could explain with absolute command and clarity, the overall broad aspects of his field .....the scientific "book" has now devolved almost exclusively into sound bite compilations of proliferating publish-or-perish symposia...meaningfuln... has largely fallen prey to "news"..it is bit hard to envision a Newton writing "Principia", or Laplace writing "la Mecanique Celeste" in this day and age......
    Reply
  •  
    Jun 07 09:19 PM
    If he only half right there is merit in delivery and connectivity...Thus a Yahoo purchase is required to help get there. Content is everywhere!
    Reply
More Comments on WPO ยป
More by Jeff Jarvis
Articles on related themes
Internet Content/Community
Newspapers
Book Publishing
Cable