It's the End of the World as We Know it

You’ve been told, in recent months, that the party is over. Companies are failing at an alarming rate. Perhaps your own company is one of them. Maybe not yet, but you’re worried. So maybe you don’t want to hear a pep talk. You want to be told that the sky is falling, that Rome is burning.

But wait a minute.

Why do you work on the Web? If the only answer is, "To make lots and lots of money in a very short period of time," then please close this magazine immediately, cancel your subscription, and sign up with Amway, or invest your life savings in Lotto tickets. Your chances to meet your goals will be roughly the same. If anybody has any reason to despair, it’s the get-rich-quick schemers.

There has always been, in America at least, a get-rich-quick scheme du jour. In the past few years, the Web has attracted any number of entrepreneurs and investors who, in the normal course of things, would have spent their money buying training tapes on building real estate empires in Hawaii, or sales kits for weight-loss pills. They have thrown their money onto the Web without any knowledge of the Web itself and zero understanding of why they should be excited about it in the first place (except for the fact that they might hit it big).

They are not, however, the perpetrators of any crime. They are the victims. These are the day traders and the thousands of people who, based on their success in real estate, retail or automotive mechanics, have been angel investors for Web businesses selling products and services that they could not even begin to understand. I’m talking about the Web businesspeople who, in order to get VC funding, gritted their teeth, shut their eyes, and committed to sky-high revenue models in their business plans that they had no idea how to reach. They took it on faith; all of them: day traders, angel investors and business plan authors alike. The faith came out of the hype. And the hype came out of bad journalism.

That’s right: I lay the full blame for this crazy gold rush, and subsequent crash, on the backs of lazy (or worse) reporters and editors who didn’t bother to investigate, understand and interpret the most important story in the history of information technology — the rise of the World Wide Web in general, and streaming media in particular — but instead merely passed along the wild-eyed hype they read in press releases and heard at self-interested technology seminars and conferences run by hypocrites who were themselves only looking for a fast buck.

Obviously, I don’t put our own company’s journalism and conferences in that category. In fact, I’m proud that we have always taken our charge very seriously (that charge being, precisely, to investigate, understand and interpret the most important story in the history of information technology). Streaming Media events, streamingmedia.com and Streaming Media Magazine have never been about hype — nor have we ever been about the fast buck. We never believed that the level of speculation we saw in the first five years of our industry’s existence was sustainable.

Despite a bearish outlook on Wall Street and in the mainstream press, the potential market for streaming media applications, tools and content remains strong. Few are excited about the short-term prospects in our industry, but even fewer believe that the great and fundamental shift in communications technology represented by streaming media has been reversed by the collapse of the market bubble. If anything, the opportunities are even stronger than before for those companies that are solid and responsible, and that offer meaningful products and services. The playing field has become sparser, but the remaining players are the strong ones, by and large.

Whether you’re one of the people who never got to play, or one of the people who played and lost — or, like me, if you’re one of the people who lucked into a good situation and are still in the game — now is the time to pick up the ball. Get going. Keep going. Start over. Whatever.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.