World’s Richest Man Does Not Get It

And now…..this

A few years ago, Lisa and I were in Venice when we saw the biggest private yacht I have ever seen pull into the Grand Canal. It looked more like an aircraft carrier.

“What in the world is that?” I asked.  A local Italian told me: “That is the private yacht of Carlos Slim, the world’s wealthiest man.”

That was the first, and last I had heard of the Mexican Carlos Slim worth and estimated $69 billion, until yesterday.

Bloomberg announed that Slim was launching an on-line TV service that was going to star Larry King as its centerpiece.

That would be 79-year old Larry King, formerly of CNN.

Now, I have nothing against 79-year olds being on line, but the idea that Slim would place King, a remnant of conventional broadcasting, as the centerpiece of his ‘new’ online video service speaks volumes, not only about why it will not work, but also about how some of the smartest people in the world fail to be able to grapple with new technologies.

When new technologies arrive, people tend to take them and jam them into old ways of working.  It’s safe, but it doesn’t really leverge off of what those new technologies are capable of.

Take The New York Times.

The New York Times is a fantastic newspaper.  In the late 1990s, the Times launched its website, www.nytimes. com.  Go take a look.

What do you see?

A newspaper, online.

A print newspaper, on you computer screen.

I mean, that’s fine, but the Internet is capable of so much more than reproducing pring.

It is interactive, it is non-linear, it can delvier crisp video, audio, interaction, graphics – a whole range of fantastic 2-way, and multi-way experiences.  But when The New York Times (which is run by very smart people) moves online, what does it do? It transports its 150 years of printing experience on paper to the web.  There it is – a newspaper – without the paper.

My 85-year old father-in-law (bless him), lives in Notthingham, England.  A few years ago, we bought him a computer and got him online, He’s pretty good with it, and now he even texts us.  But when he sets out to write us an email, the first thing he does is write out the entire email longhand on a piece of yellow legal paper, with a pen. Then, he goes back and corrects it.  Longhand. Then, when it is perfect, he sits down and transcribes it onto the computer and fires off his emails.  It works, and he makes lovely emails, but you might say he doesn’t quite get the potential of the technology. He is a child of a linear, hand-written world. It’s how he sees the world.

At the end of the day, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between my father-in-law and Mr. Slim (except for a few billion dollars).  Slim looks at this remarkably new technology of online video which is global, interactive, open platformed, non-linear and has so much massive potential for new ways of communicating information and ideas, and with his billions of dollars, decides to slap Larry King’s face onto our cellphones and iPads.   King is to online video what my father-in-law’s yellow hand-written legal pads are to email: a remnant of an old way of working slammed into a new technology. It’s linear television jammed into a non-linear, interactive world. It works, but it shows Slim doesn’t really get what video on the web is all about.

Sixty years ago, when television was first invented,  no one really knew what to do with it either.  After all, there had never been ‘television’ before. It was a totally new medium with no models to copy.

Until then, the dominant medium had been radio. And radio was done by putting a guy in front of a microphone and throwing the switch.  With no model for TV, the pioneers in the field simply wheeled a camera into the radio newsroom and presto – TV.

Take a look at NBC Nightly News or any other network broadcast.   What is it, really?  A guy in a tie, sitting behind a desk with a microphone in front of him, reading the news.  In 2012, the world’s most expensively produced TV news shows are actually 1938 radio.. on TV.

And now, Mr. Slim, with his billions of dollars, is bringing that 1938 model to the web.  Larry King, whose iconographic show on CNN for years portrayed him – behid a desk with a gigantic micorphone.

Look! Now I can ‘see’ radio on my iPad!

Pretty darned amazing, all this new-fangled technology.