Plus ca Change - trading places in the broadband economy

In terms of understanding the difficulties in organisation change, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 - 1527) had it sussed:

"There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all who profit by the new order. This lukewarmness arises partly from fear of their adversaries, who have law in their favor, and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not believe in anything new until they have had an actual experience of it."

This post is partly driven by reading about TrustedPlaces' experience in getting $1m funding (well done guys - all that partying has paid off - now comes the hard bit !) and partly by our own experiences over the last 2 years in talking to companies that are potentially impacted by the emerging broadband media world.

Broadband IP / web 2.0 / whatever buzz phrase one wants, multiplied by the penetration it now has, simply changes the way people interact online. The bandwidth available means, that to a greater or lesser extent, everyone will be an online media business.

Re TrustedPlaces, its interesting because we did a bit of preliminary work for an established business in that space a while back, but who did not (and still have not it would seem) found the compelling reason to change, their risk now of course is that new - and now funded - startups begin to eat their lunch reviews.

The difficulty of course, as Machiavelli showed, is that its is very hard to change the Established Order until it is crystal clear that the New Order works, and that the Old Ways do not anymore - and that can be too late (or at least severely value destroying) if the competitors are fuelled with large amounts of Other Peoples Money and a "Free till we get Big" business plan (or even just good at what they do).

And, (it seems to us) a tipping point is now emerging - we are seeing companies (outside of the immediate telemedia industry, which has already been heavily impacted) we spoke to 1 -2 years ago now coming back and saying they are finding these new businesses starting to compete seriously, and at the same time, from restaurant reviews to real estate, from TV to telephony, from financial services to fantasy gaming, new businesses are increasingly getting funded to go out and compete some more.

Its also interesting to see how some of the "Web 1.0" titans are reacting. Google plays the Cisco strategy and buys everyone, Yahoo and eBay place bets - sorry, buy strategically (Yahoo pays a lot less for its bets though ;), Amazon is shifting from bookshifter to bitshifter with the Cloud, and Microsoft is currently playing corporate patent troll on the open source movement.

All signs that, as another wise man wrote - The times, they are a changing.....