Didn't See That Coming

Fred Zollo, the producer of the Mississippi Burning, dismissed the Internet threat to the movie industry, less than a decade back:

“How can you watch a movie on a computer screen?”

Except that almost everyone, everywhere today is glued to their smartphones watching movies! Which, by the way, are so much smaller than the computer screens that Zollo was so contemptuous about. And that’s without even getting into the people who watch movies on their tablets or even (gasp) their PC’s and laptops. Today Netflix has as many subscribers as HBO…streaming movies and serials via the Internet is starting to catch up with good old cable.

This isn’t a blog to mock someone with the benefit of hindsight. Rather, it’s about this question Seth Godin that once asked:

“How come so many of the attendees at the 1927 Solvay Conference went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics?”

The equivalent question applies to every tectonic shift that is triggered by the tech sector, like watching movies on tiny screens.

Godin’s answer applies to almost every period of revolutionary change:

“(They) showed up and shared their best work precisely because there was a revolution going on. Rapid change exposes the work of outsiders, neophytes and most of all, those attracted by the chance to grow, fast. Rapid change sweeps aside the status quo and those that defend it (the stuck former geniuses and the stuck bureaucrats). It replaces them with those willing to leap.”

And that’s exactly why the Internet and electronics industry hit the traditional movie industry so hard. And while the principle is easy to understand, it’s hard to assume that it might happen to you. Which is why incumbents are always so surprised. And why such things will keep happening. Because, as Godin put it:

“Revolutions make heroes at least as much as heroes make revolutions.”