The Steve Jobs, Small-is-the-New-Big World

Val Landi's Weblog, Thursday February 9

Is Steve Jobs too much a product guy to succeed as the head of a major media conglomorate at a time when media products need to become media platforms?

John Hegel, the former McKinsey consultant and acclaimed author asks this question in his current Edge Perspectives blog.

The key to Hegel’s question is his observation, which we at Realtime believe is fundamental to building a 21st century media company, that in a world of scarce attention, media must be an interactive platform, not a standalone product that you buy and then read, or view, or listen to in the specific way that the content creator intended.

Our new media world is a rip, mashup, blog, podcast, RSS delivery, small-is-the-new-big, world.

Media platforms use the Internet to build relationships with specific market segments and communities in a world dominated and driven by attention scarcity rather than distribution scarcity, which empowered the old top-down push world of the dying media conglomerates (the current Time-Warner/Carl Icahn/Bruce Wasserstein proxy battle is not a historical blip—as my grandfather used to say: if you find a turtle on a fencepost, it’s not an accident). 

21st Century media platforms are designed to be built upon – they create opportunities for the original creator, for third parties, and for your customers and prospects to extend, enhance and tailor the content in ways never anticipated. As Hegel stresses, offered as a platform, content can create far more value than any equivalent standalone product.

I, for one, think that if anyone can walk the bridge from a product-centric media world to a relationship-centric media world, it’s Jobs. Steve is at the top of my list of people I’d most enjoying sharing a leisurely diner with (Well, sorry Steve, but on second thought, maybe second to a dinner with Uma Thurman).

But as Hegel underscores: the new media creators and their sponsors will need to develop the skills required to use the deep understanding of their markets to become ever more helpful in connecting them with content (and other relationships) regardless of who produced the content.

The mindset shift required to do this is not trivial; neither is the opportunity.