Tech Disruption Is a Myth

blog.moodio.co.uk

4 pointsmswehli2 comments

I follow this a bit in the news industry: it's a business that's been deeply changed by the internet and there are no easy answers for how to fund good news reporting in the future.

Yet media executives have demonstrated an unlikely talent in not just missing out on opportunities to make working online platforms and re-claiming some ad revenue from social media companies. Instead, they've been jumping onto any technical innovation (VR, video embeds, blockchain, ...) with not the slightest bit of strategy, just hoping to get some disruption fairy dust on them that might magically save them.

So, instead of working on business models, you can regularly see media executives at conferences with Oculus Rift on their head and wildly flailing arms. Beautiful metaphor, if you ask me...

Yeah exactly. They run after these vanity projects which i find are usually vanity driven or built on the desire but don't appear to want to put the work in to have a proper tech strategy or invest in it. I think a lot of the time is that in these larger organizations it's less risky to simply do nothing at all then to try to innovate, as if you innovate and change how things were traditional done and then fail, everyone will blame you and it can be bad for your career, while if you sit back and do nothing then you can make excuses for why it wasn't your fault or that the organization itself was simply no longer relevant.

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