It was my pleasure to address the National and State Librarians of Australasia on the eve of their strategic planning meeting in Auckland at the start of November this year. I have been involved in libraries for a few years now, and am always humbled by the expertise, hard work, and dedication that librarians of all stripes have. Yet it's no revelation that libraries aren't the great sources of knowledge and information on the web that they were in the pre-Internet days. I wanted to push on that and challenge the National and State librarians to think better about the Internet.
I prefaced my talk by saying that none of this is original, so it shouldn't come as a surprise. I merely wanted to bring the different strands together in a way that showed them how to think about the opportunities afforded to libraries for the digital age.
Below is the text of the talk, and I've attached PDF versions as well (A4 and US-Letter). I've released this under CC-BY-SA and hope it's useful for you. Please let me know if it is!
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Bill Gates wrote a bestseller in 1995. He was on a roll: Microsoft Windows had finally crushed its old foe the Macintosh computer from Apple, Microsoft was minting money hand over fist, and he was hugely respected in the industry he had helped start. He roped in other big brains from Microsoft to write a book to answer the question, "what next?" The Road Ahead talked about the implications of everyone having a computer and how they would use the great Information Superhighway that was going to happen.
The World Wide Web appears in the index to The Road Ahead precisely four times. Bill Gates didn't think the Internet would be big. The Information Superhighway of Gates's fantasies would have more structure than the Internet, be better controlled than the Internet, in short it would be more the sort of thing that a company like Microsoft would make.
Bill Gates and Microsoft were caught flat-footed by the take-up of the Internet. They had built an incredibly profitable and strong company which treated computers as disconnected islands: Microsoft software ran on the computers, but didn't help connect them. Gates and Microsoft soon realized the Internet was here to stay and rushed to fix Windows to deal with it, but they never made up for that initial wrong-footing.
At least part of the reason for this was because they had this fantastic cash cow in Windows, the island software. They were victims of what Clayton Christenson calls the Innovator's Dilemma: they couldn't think past their own successes to build the next big thing, the thing that'd eat their lunch. They still haven't got there: Bing, their rival to Google, has eaten $5.5B since 2009 and it isn't profitable yet.........
http://nathan.torkington.com/blog/2011/11/23/libraries-where-it-all-went-wrong/
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