Spontaneous ∂erivation

So I was venting to a wise friend of mine at lunch about the hand-wringing of publishing with respect to ebooks and other realms in the world of digital.

“Well, you grew up differently,” he said, having a good 20 years on me. We both mean in the technical industry, of course.

“Think in terms of middlemen,” he said. “In your company, there’s no separation between the company and its products. You develop, sell, and market in-house. But in older industries—like manufacturing, and it sounds like publishing too—they sourced those out.”

How weird. That sounds horribly inefficient.

“In a way. But publishing’s reaction isn’t new. Manufacturing’s gone through the same changes, with about the same amount of horror. The car industry, for instance, way before your time. At some point you have to cut out the middleman.”

So when does the kermit-flailing stop?

He just smiled at me and didn’t say a word.

GAH. Old man.

This is not going to be a nice post. Then again, many articles of late all around concerning the publishing industry’s survival haven’t been nice.

I make my meager living in a viciously competitive environment. To put it politely to the Big Publishing Five, for the last several decades you were never in as much danger as the Big Tech companies were in their infancy… and still are.

Not even giants like Microsoft, who strides the tech world as unto a Colossus, are ever truly safe.¹

I’ll let that sink in.

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1. If you think being threatened by Linux is no big deal, just remember: IBM can eat Microsoft for breakfast, and is extremely interested in Linux…. [↩]