Digitize or be gone!

Digitize or disappear, that was the message at the “Digital Publishing and Media 2010” round-table hosted by EMC and HCL in New York City earlier this month.

Hats-off to Lou Giordano and whoever set up the event because this was indirect selling at its finest. EMC and HCL stayed in the background while James McQuivey of Forrester Research called publishers (educational, trade, periodical), media, and entertainment companies to action.

Go digital or disappear like the newspapers have, he said. Go digital or lose to someone who will digitize and distribute (think iTunes). Go digital and distribute in multiple formats to a variety of digital devices (think about all the content that can be accessed by your iPhone) or lose customers.

Go digital and distribute in multiple formats to a variety of digital devices or lose your customers.

Though I can’t quote McQuivey word for word from his talk, here’s what he said in a Forrester executive summary.

 “We have proclaimed the death of the music industry, the decline of print journalism, and the radical overhaul of the TV and movie business.”

At the round-table he referred to this as a meltdown and announced that now, right now, is the time to rebuild. There’s no time to debate, no time for long term planning, he said. And he may have a point. Free content can be found at little or no cost all over the web. There’s hulu, there are video podcasts, and there's even a brand new "TV Guide" for the web. It's called SetJam, I watched them launch at the Web 2.0 expo in New York last week.  

I mention SetJam because I happen to know that the lightweight tool cost just over 50k  to build. It points to programming that is already available on the web. At the moment there are 11,071 titles to pick from.

How much longer will we need cable to access  television and movies?

McQuivey wasn’t exactly preaching to the choir as he spoke. “What if  our advertisers aren’t ready to go digital?” someone from print media asked. It doesn’t matter,  said McGuivey, your customers are ready, and if you don’t go digital now your customers will simply get their content from someone who has.

And while I’m fully on board with McQuivey, (I watch podcasts on my Touch more often than I watch TV), I wonder what this means for big companies and, quite frankly, for big software vendors, whose products are expensive and whose sales cycles are long. Will a boot-strapped start-up “just do it” while the suits sit in meetings? Is the web that great and equalizer?

One of my next posts may very well be about an EMC customer who is using Documentum in a real cool way to create new value for customers. What’s especially interesting about them is that technology wasn’t what disrupted their business model, it was students reselling their text books, not once, but over and over again.