7.3.1 | Blogs
March 15, 2008 | The Challenge of Seeing the Forest for the Trees
By Mark Ouyang
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Understanding the need for content to be delivered in any format, to any device, at any time requires a broader perspective - one that can be hard to achieve when you are up to your neck fighting daily deadlines, costs, and interruptions. In this situation, it can be counter-intuitive to realize the web is a complementary, not a competitive business to your current operations.
With hindsight, it's easy to laugh at the railroad barons' myopia when they dismissed the airplane's arrival by saying, "But we're in the railroad business." Had they defined their business differently and more broadly like "We're in the transportation business", they might have seen the competitive threat the airplane posed to them. They might have made the proper investments and diversified in time before they lost the business for transporting people across the country.
Yet, substitute a few names and circumstances and today, we face the same perspective challenge as those railroad barons did. I smile sympathetically when I hear some business executives say, " But, we're in the newspaper/ magazine/ TV/ radio broadcasting business". As Yogi Berra once famously said, "It's deja vu all over again."
We're in the information and communication age. When viewed in this broader, proper context, it becomes easier to see what investments need to be made to stay relevant. In our time compressed environment, we seek multiple ways to access information that suits our individual circumstances of the moment. The business that understands and figures out how to deliver their content in any format, to any device, at any time, will kept mindshare and win.
