Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, predicting the future of media, predicts that all print publications will die within the next decade.
He couldn’t be more wrong, but that’s not surprising, given Microsoft’s track record of late. When I worked for Microsoft in 1997-98, I found a lot of Microsofties who didn’t read any print publication. If it wasn’t digital, they weren’t interested. That may hold true for much of the younger generation, but there are enough 45-and-overs to keep print magazines and books going well into the 2020s and 2030s. As for newspapers, I suggested at the Future of News conference at Princeton last month that half of the daily newspapers in the U.S. will be gone by 2023. But the other half won’t (though they’ll need to evolve in significant ways).
Change in the real world happens slowly.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Leave a Reply