Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”
Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.
Andreessen once famously put the New York Times on deathwatch
for its stubborn insistence on trying to save and prolong its legacy print business. With all the recent excitement in media quarters recently over Apple’s upcoming iPad and other tablet computers, and their potential to create a market for paid digital versions and subscriptions of newspapers and magazines, I wondered if Andreessen still felt the same way. Does he think the iPad will change anything?
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Popular Science tutto online
Via Luca Castelli Una cosa è certa: non c’è niente di certo. Almeno non per quanto riguarda i giornali e Internet. Proprio mentre il vento sembrava essere cambiato, con le bellicose dichiarazioni di Rupert Murdoch nei confronti di Google e l’annuncio del New York Times di un dolce passaggio verso le news online a pagamento, … Leggi tutto
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