by Roger Pynn
How can it be that our world changes so fast?
Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod’s fascinating ”Did You Know” PowerPoint answers the question. Shift happens.
I was there when we all jumped on board the Internet with America Online back in the early eighties. It was a monster … you got AOL CDs in your mailbox, at the supermarket – they were everywhere. “You’ve got mail” became synonymous with one’s personal relationship with the digital highway.
It roared through and beyond the dot com era and into a $124 billion merger with Time Warner and now is probably worth about $6 billion at most while Google and Facebook are the monsters of the day.
The world shifts faster than we can blink. Jeff Kearns Bloomberg story on AOL’s declining value never even mentions its predecessor CompuServ (which AOL swallowed) … much less The Source, one of – if not the first – of these Internet access points. In the late 70s I used to sit fascinated with a Telex machine typing in news queries and watching it print out reams of information from The Source on scrolls of newsprint. That’s right … no monitor.
You have to wonder what is next to go.
Posted by thestrategicfirm 
