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6 Nov 10 Let Luddites Point The Way To The Great Business Opportunities of Tomorrow
I had a good chuckle when I read this article from 1995 this past Friday. Basically, the article completely rubbishes the Internet, calling it a fad that will eventually go away. Doing a bit more reasearch on the authord, Clifford Stoll, reveals that he has made quite a career out of being a professional backwards luddite, resisting, criticising and working against any conceivable progress. A statist in the truest sense of the word.
It’s easy to dismiss Stoll and his ilk as shortsighted crackpots unable to see the development that is plainly in front of them. Another angle would be to see them as a viable business of backwardness in themselves: Stoll and guys like Nicholas Carr have made careers out of being luddites, there will always be enough people wanting to stop time to provide a market for people selling them books telling them what they want to hear.
However, as backwards and wrong Stoll has turned out to be, I prefer to see him as a prophet of the future. Why? Well, let’s re-read his absurd article one more time and see what his objections are as to why the Internet will never really be very successful, based on his 1995 findings and mindset:
- Irrelevance of search results: I think Google has quite successfully addressed this problem, and made a business out of it.
- Content that lacks editing and curating, hence credibility: Hmm, did Wikipedia and other crowdsourced sites address this or what?
- Difficulties in getting paid online: I think Paypal, Cybersource and any number of other credit card processors and payments solutions have addressed this space..
- The absurdity of the notion that you could connect people and build communities online: Facebook? Twitter? Match.com? Many others?
If you look at Stolls article, each and every one of his objections as to why the Internet would fail, has actually been addressed by one or more companies that these days are household names. In fact, each objection by Stoll was a blatant multi billion dollar business opportunity just waiting to be fixed!
This gets back to one of the core running themes of this blog: many things are simply about perspective and mindset. Some people chose to see objections, others opportunity. In this particular instance, Stoll saw lots of problems, others saw opportunities that made them some of the richest men on the planet.
Every objection holds an opportunity. So the next time someone complains about why something cant be done, listen carefully to his objections, and think of ways you could make that objection go away. If you succeed, it could very well make you the next Bill Gates, Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg.
