1992 war der Managing Editor der Washington Post auf einer Konferenz in Japan, u.a. von Apple organisiert und mit Douglas Adams als Speaker. Er schrieb ein erstaunliches Memo heim an die Post, dessen Vorhersagen schon beeindruckend sind.

„The Post is not in a pot of water, and we’re smarter than the average frog. But we do find ourselves swimming in an electronic sea where we could eventually be devoured — or ignored as an
unnecessary anachronism. Our goal, obviously, is to avoid getting boiled as the electronic revolution continues.“

Ich sag’s mal so, hätte die Post die Hälfte der hier genannten Ideen proaktiv angegangen (Suchmaschinen! Online News! Internetplattform für Business-Suche!), sie hätte eher frühzeitig Amazon kaufen können statt andersrum:

August 6, 1992

To: Don Graham
Alan Spoon
Ralph Terkowitz
Tom Ferguson
Tuesday Group Vice Presidents
From: Bob Kaiser

John Sculley’s invitation to attend an Apple-organized conference
on the future of ”multimedia” – computers, telecommunications,
television and other entertainment media, and traditional news
media – gave me a good opportunity to learn and to think about The
Post’s place in a fast-changing technological environment. This is
a brief report on the conference and thoughts that occurred to me
while attending.
+ + +
Alan Kay, sometimes described as the intellectual forefather of the
personal computer, offered a cautionary analogy that seemed to
apply to us. It involves the common frog. You can put a frog in a
pot of water and slowly raise the temperature under the pot until
it boils, but the frog will never jump. Its nervous system cannot
detect slight changes in temperature.
The Post is not in a pot of water, and we’re smarter than the
average frog. But we do find ourselves swimming in an electronic
sea where we could eventually be devoured — or ignored as an
unnecessary anachronism. Our goal, obviously, is to avoid getting
boiled as the electronic revolution continues
I was taken aback by predictions at the conference about the next
stage of the computer revolution. It was offered as an
indisputable fact that the rate of technological advancement is
actually increasing. Dave Nagel, the impressive head of Apple’s
Advanced Technology Group, predicted “the three billions” would be
a reality by the end of this decade: relatively cheap personal
computers with a billion bits of memory (60 million is common
today), with microprocessors that can process a billion
instructions per second (vs. about 50 million today) that can
transmit data to other computers at a billion bits per second (vs.
15-20 million today). At that point the PC will be a virtual
supercomputer, and the easy transmission and storage of large
quantities of text, moving and still pictures, graphics, etc., will
be a reality. Eight years from now.
I asked many purported wizards at the conference if they thought
Nagel was being overoptimistic. None thought so. The machines he
envisioned will have the power to become vastly more user-friendly
than today’s PC’s. They will probably be able to take voice
instructions, and read commands written by hand or an electronic
notepad, or right on the screen. None of this is science fiction –
– it’s just around the corner.
+ + +
“Multimedia” or “new media” is a popular idea for one possible use
of these powerful computers connected by a fiber optic network.
(Fiber optics will effectively eliminate the existing “band width”
limits on transmission of data through the air or by copper wire. A
fiber network could carry two to three thousand times the stream of
data that can be sent over the air in all the existing radio
frequencies!) The prophets of “multimedia” foresee it in many
forms. The first would be simple — interactive pay-per-view
movies that could decimate the movie rental business. More
interesting are packages of text, photos and film that could be
used to create customized news products at many different levels of
sophistication. At the top end, such a product might contain the
text (or spoken text) of a Post story on the big news of the day,
accompanied by CNN’s live footage and/or Post photographers’
pictures, plus instantly available background on the story, its
principal actors, earlier stories on the same subject, etc. All of
this could be read on segments of a large, bright and easy-to-read
screen (screens are also being improved at a great rate).
Of course the prophets also foresee a lot of advertising on this
new medium, predicting that it will have great power because of its
ability to give consumers exactly what they want — all the ads for
used 4-wheel-drive vehicles, or all the women’s-wear stores having
sales today, or all the theaters showing “Hook,” etc.
And there are countless ideas for entertainment and games. One
that struck my fancy would allow kids (of all ages) to put
themselves into familiar movies, actually adding new characters,
new dialogue, etc.
+ + +
It’s quite easy to get swept up in these sugar-plum visions of a
new media universe. I don’t feel competent to judge the
plausibility of all this, but there are obvious obstacles that will
have to be overcome. The fiber network has to get built, for
example. (At the conference a number of gurus predicted that cable
systems might build it first –and thus undo the telephone
companies. Time-Warner — in Queens — and Viacom — in California
— are building pilot projects.) The machines do have to become a
lot more “transparent” than current PC’s — as one participant put
it, they have to become as easy to use as microwave ovens or ATM’s.
This will require dramatic progress in the development of software,
which is far harder to predict than the all-but-inevitable
explosion of hardware capability.
One of the brightest people at the conference, Ed Horowitz of
Viacom, observed that building the highway will be the easy part.
It will be much more challenging to create the stuff to put on the
highway that will appeal to consumers. The look and feel of new
products will be terribly important, Horowitz said. So will their
value in everyday life, either as entertainers or educators and
informers.
+ + +
I learned a lot at this conference about the techies’ view of the
world. Many of the computer types had never thought much about the
points Horowitz raised. A lot of them seemed to regard the content
of new media as a given, or something that could be pulled off a
shelf and dealt with like a commodity. But there were some people
at the conference who understood that content is actually an
extremely challenging problem.
My small contribution to the meeting was to argue (with John Evans
of News Corp., a glib and bright Englishman who says he first
introduced personal classifieds as publisher of the Village Voice)
that in fact, all successful news media offer a look, a feel, a
personality. They are the products of talented reporters and,
above all, editors who make informed choices for their readers and
viewers. After this conference I am more convinced than ever that
this is a key to our success. Our devoted customers like lots of
things about The Post — the advertisements as much as the news,
the typeface as much as the box scores, the comics as much as the
front page. Most important, they like the package much more than
any of its elements. The same is true of Vanity Fair readers or 60
Minutes watchers. Successful media provide an experience, not just
bits of information.
It is widely assumed among computer people that the public will
love the idea of playing editor — of organizing the information
stream around personal needs and preferences to create
individualized “newspapers.” I talked this through with a number
of them, and realized that I disagreed with their sense of human
nature. Of course some people (like the computer hacks who already
do it) will be pleased to steer around the electronic universe in
search of fun or satisfaction, but most of us are still like the
members of the circle around the fire, listening to the elder tell
the ancient stories of our tribe. Humans have always liked
listening to (and watching, or reading) stories. That’s why we
tell stories in the paper, and why we tend to regard well-told
stories as the best journalism. Even computer hacks like good
stories, so they have made an idol of Douglas Adams, author of The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe (he was one of the more
interesting people at the conference)
Confronted by the information glut of the modern world, I suspect
even the computer-comfortable citizens of the 21st Century will
still be eager to take advantage of reporters and editors who offer
to sort through the glut intelligently and seek to make sense of it
for them. Interestingly, when I asked a number of people at the
conference what they’d like to be able to do in the electronic
future, many spoke of finding all the extant journalism on subjects
of interest to them. (Compuserve now offers a rather primitive
grazing tool to permit this sort of thing.) No one volunteered
that he/she was eager to have access to the full transcript of
Congressional hearings and debates, or the full screenplays of new
movies, or the list of every transaction on yesterday’s NASDAQ.
They all expressed a preference for processed information —- in
other words, what we can provide.
+ + +
Over lunch I asked Sculley about a prediction made at the
conference by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab that the TV
sets of the year 2000 would not be Sonys or Zeniths, but Apples and
IBMS — in other words, that smart PC’s would replace traditional
television by incorporating its functions. Sure, that would be
possible, Sculley said, but why bother? No one’s making much
profit building TV receivers. What he’d like to be doing in the
year 2000 is providing “the software” — the content that will run
on the new machines. That’s where the money will be, Sculley
suggested.
John Evans of News Corp. crystallized the point in the last session
of the conference. Speaking for the Murdoch empire, he told the
computer people. “You want what we’ve got, including our profits.”
Evans saw no incentive to us as providers to hand over our
products. Neither do I.
In fact the computer industry is in a pickle, as any reader of the
business pages knows. The machines are becoming commodities;
prices and profits are collapsing. Apple is banking on a new world
of personal devices that just might make its products ubiquitous
(Newton is the first of these), but Sculley’s candor over lunch
suggested to me that he understands hardware is not enough.
+ + +
As usual in human affairs, there isn’t a lot of order to what is
happening around us. In its invitation to the conference, Apple
wrote of a convergence of media and technologies that will
eventually create a new telecommunications/infotech/entertaintech
universe. Perhaps. But the bright CEO of Kaleida, the Apple-IBM
joint venture to create software that will bridge the differences
between all the major computer operating systems (Macintosh, MS-
DOS, OS-2, etc.), put it more accurately. What we’re experiencing
is not so much a convergence, said Nat Goldhaber, as it is
“collision of technologies.” And it is likely to produce the full
range of outcomes associated with collisions.
If we’re riding dodge ‘em cars, drawing conclusions is risky. I’ll
offer a few tentative ones:
The world is changing with amazing speed, and we need to pay close
attention to what is happening. The growth of our own revenue for
reuse of our material in databases (about $2.06 million in 1991,
compared to $l.33 million in 1987) is one hint of future
possibilities. The public response to Post-Haste is another clue.
No one in our business has yet launched a really impressive or
successful electronic product, but someone surely will. I’d bet it
will happen rather soon. The Post ought to be in the forefront of
this — not for the adventure, but for important defensive
purposes. We’ll only defeat electronic competitors by playing
their game better than they can play it. And we can.
I was amazed how often the subject of electronic classifieds and
electronic Yellow Pages was raised with me at this conference.
Smart people are convinced that both make enormous sense. Computer
tools allow customers to quickly sort out what they want from
either medium much more efficiently than readers can now. For
example, would someone looking for a reliable car for a kid going
to college prefer our current listings, or a list of all small cars
with less than 60,000 miles selling for $5-7000? I suspect the
latter would be the choice. Would a Yellow pages user headed to
Georgetown on a shopping trip like a list of all the antique silver
dealers in Georgetown instead of what is now available in The Book?
Sure.
I’d urge that we launch two R&D projects right now, secure in the
knowledge that both will ultimately be useful and desirable, and
that waiting for others to push us into action is a mug’s game.
Both could be done with consultants and our own talent.
1) Design the electronic classifieds now. Figure out how to
capture and organize the digital computer information that we
already create for each day’s classifieds into a user-friendly data
bank. Explore software alternatives. Figure out how this could be
launched. Make sure all would-be competitors know what we’re
doing. But reserve the right to postpone implementation until a
moment when we’re confident we’ll make more money (or deter a
competitor) by launching the electronic product.
As part of the same effort, explore the feasibility of a Post
electronic Yellow Pages for the Washington Area. Why not seek to
become the dominant provider of electronic advertising and
information in our region?
2) Design the world’s first electronic newspaper. So far,
services like Nexis can provide only individual articles. We could
organize the entire paper electronically with a series of “front
pages” and other devices that would guide readers the way our
traditional cues do — headlines, captions, story placement, etc.
And we could explore the feasibility of incorporating ads in the
electronic paper.
Many at the conference talked about the way we tend to use new
media first to replicate the products produced by old media — so
early TV consisted of visible radio shows, for example. With this
in mind, our electronic Post should be thought of not as a
newspaper on a screen, but (perhaps) as a computer game converted
to a serious purpose. In other words, it should be a computer
product.
Again, because the raw material — stories, and now graphics and
photos, too — is already digitized, by far the most expensive
aspect of creating an electronic newspaper is taken care of,
gratis. What we need now is an easy-to-use architecture that would
allow one or two people each night to convert what we’ve already
done into an electronic product.
Conceivably we could come up with a software product that we could
sell to others. We could also use this concept to move into
lucrative territory now occupied by Nexis and others. Why should
people who want to retrieve Post material pay Nexis to do so? Why
not pay us instead — or in addition? If we can produce a more
efficient way to sort through Post material than Nexis offers, we
could draw off at least some Nexis clients.
I am not here dreaming of (or worrying about) a world in which
computers have displaced the printed word, and us too. I could
find no one at this conference who would predict the demise of the
newspaper. No one. All saw an important place for us. (George
Gilder, an interesting participant, actually gave me an excited
presentation on how we can use the next stages of the technological
revolution to strengthen our position as one of a very few
providers of really serious news and opinion in the world. “You
can drive the TV networks out of the news business,” Gilder
promised.)
But if newspapers are not about to become extinct, I came away
convinced that inevitably, more and more people will want to use
their computers to consume our products. As the number of such
people grows, so do our business opportunities. Imagine a world in
which we could sell a Boswell column to, say, 1.5 million baseball
fanatics for a nickel per column. That’s $75,000 in new revenue!
We could sell an entire electronic Post for several times the
newsstand price without using an ounce of ink or a roll of
newsprint — all gravy at the bottom line. Sure, not much gravy
right away. But 10 years out? It would be relatively cheap to get
ready now.
+ + +
Change is coming. In the last several years, electronic
encyclopedias have outsold printed ones by about 4-to-1.
Electronic atlases have done even better. The use of computers to
transmit information of all kinds is growing at a frantic pace.
Computer networks are exploding. Today 12 billion messages are
being sent across computer networks every month, according to Dave
Nagel of Apple.
There’s a big and important role for The Washington Post in this
new wo