The Last Days of Time Inc
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
(1) https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/11/robert-hughes-the...
Someone will figure out how to capture the outsize profits they produce, or some technology will come along that they miss, and it will all fade similarly.
Don't know what that technology is, or when it will happen, but the fat days for nearly every industry eventually come to an end.
The last shop that contacted me ranged from 35k to 60k CAD. They couldn't even keep the appointment they had made with me in advance.
There's a rise in people who work with technology (procurement managers, for one), however, who are often paid 4x to 6x as much as that last shop. They are, in my experience anyway, half as informed as anyone who has directly worked on similar technologies. But I digress.
Although the cases are quite similar: Magazines and newspapers once were solid industries with some highly-profitable companies and where one could at least get a solid wage, and, if one was lucky, one could live a luxurious life on the company's dime.
Now even the strongest newspapers and magazines are struggling, and one is lucky to have a job in the field at all, never mind a basic expense account.
Someday that will happen to the Googles and Facebooks of the technology industry, and similarly to the perks they once provided their employees.
Bear in mind that with extravagant perks and 20% time, Google's strategy was explicitly to maximize the chance that this new idea would be produced by Google itself.
It's interesting to look back at to what extent this has and has not panned out. For example, how come Facebook and Dropbox were not developed at Google and it had to crash-create competing products? Do any of Google's non-search properties count as next big things? Arguably AdSense perhaps, but that depended on being Google to start with.
Google's big failure has been in social pretty much across the board. It's tried a bunch of things beginning with Orkut and it's all amounted to pretty much zilch. I suspect that there's some fundamental mindset mismatch going on.
GSuite/Gmail has been pretty successful (as has maps). Being very competitive with a company (Microsoft) that had a huge incumbent's advantage has to count for something.
We'll see if projects like Waymo ever amount to something. IMO commercial applications are further out than many think and it's unclear the degree to which it will be Goggle who makes a lot of money from it.
The challenge wasn't to get people to build incredible new ideas, it was the same as in every large company with "an unit" generating ideas, like Xerox -> PARC, Bell Telephone Company -> Bell Labs, etc. The leadership doesn't care about any of this, they want to expand their main business.
No executive wants to be made obsolete and be replaced by the next thing run by other executives. Google is no different. For instance Orkut (person, not site) was running the site on his own on couple of servers the whole time. Google paid very little attention to it.
Then either they changed or I did, I'm not certain which. Sometime along 2000 or so it seems their point of view took a pointed political turn. (I feel the same towards ESPN, CNN, etc.)
When that happened, it ceased to become news to me. It was more 'entertainment', and I admit they still had some interesting ideas. But I didn't really trust Time anymore. At that point, they had reached the point of no return, it was no longer 'must read' literature. I could easily skip it, and I often did.
I wonder if many others feel the same way.
Furthermore, the idea that Chiang Kai-shek was a supporter of human rights really doesn't line up well with reality.
I know that for all the ones I used to like I changed into liking their older releases more. But they changed so much that I can't stand any of them today.
Good Girls Revolt https://www.amazon.com/Good-Girls-Revolt/dp/B017AOY4WS
I've been a Time subscriber in various ways for decades. It used to be the primary way that I ingested news. But times (ahem) have changed.
The culture was so “Mad Men,” even at the height of the
feminist movement, that my boss felt free, when we worked
late closing the magazine on Fridays nights, taking all the
young male writers out to dinner at the steakhouse
downstairs without a thought that they were walking past the
offices of the only two women in the hall — me and my
friend, the late Susan Tifft. Susan, a staunch feminist,
confronted the boss. But we never did get to that
steakhouse.