Automation at factories means that there are simply fewer and fewer manufacturing jobs. And this is a good thing. Machinery does most of the work growing the food we eat, and producing the goods we use (durable and nondurable). What's left is information, hence the moniker "The Information Age."
But if this is the great era of data, then what's with the demise of so many information companies? Newspapers, Record Labels, Encyclopedias, all heading south.
The now-familiar struggles of the newspaper industry is in the news again with the brinksmanship in labor negotiations at the Boston Globe, as well-told by David Warsh in this week's economicprincipals.com essay. David is more optimistic than I about the business of newspapering, but I'd like to think I'm more optimistic about the future of journalism. He concludes,
Never mind Warren Buffett’s admonition over the weekend that there is no price at which he would consider a newspaper an attractive investment (he still has positions in two, the Buffalo News and the Washington Post). Repair work has never been his passion. With a little luck, the best regional papers – The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times – will wind up back in the hands of people who know how to run them. If so, the newspaper industry will return to a scaled-down semblance of its former self – a profitable and stable group of companies in the first-draft-of-history business. But then, I am a congenital optimist. I have sometimes been wrong.
Yet I find the story of Encarta even more interesting. Encarta, as you may recall, was the revolutionary Microsoft product that put an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM in 1993 which was the creatively destructive force that assaulted Encyclopedia Brittanica, first published around 1768. Now it is Encarta that will be shuttering -- this year, even refunding existing users rather than continue into 2010 -- signaling the acceleration of technology cycles in the new century. In this NYT piece, Randall Stross describes how the destroyer became the destroyee:
It’s hard to look at the end of the Encarta experiment without the free and much larger Wikipedia springing immediately to mind. But Encarta arguably would have failed even without that competition. The Google-indexed Web forms a virtual encyclopedia that Encarta never had a chance of competing against.
Encarta was conceived pre-Web and had a long gestation. In 1985, Bill Gates envisioned a CD-ROM encyclopedia as a “high-price, high-demand” product with the potential of becoming as profitable to Microsoft as Word or Excel.
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