My main takeaway here was that Gates thought that the cost of distribution on the internet would be so low that there would be no large business that could form. However one of the interviewers pushes back by saying that because the cost of distribution would be so low, aggregators would naturally form a monopoly on this business. Incredibly prescient point in a world of Facebooks and Googles. Anyone know who she is, the Wired interviewer who makes this point?
Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
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Re: Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
#12"There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that".
Netflix revenue last year was $11.6 billion.
Fascinating interview.
Re: Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
To change what for? I don't understand your question.
For it to be a viable business.
No, it didn't have to. The journos ask Gates why he enters into that field (with MSNBC) if he can't see a 4$ billion business in it. He then says: while we won't make those 4 billions (we are making with software), we believe we still can have a profitable business.
I don't know if MSNBC was profitable at that time, but many such businesses were (and still are.)
The question was about the overall size of the industry.
Re: Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
#14My main takeaway here was that Gates thought that the cost of distribution on the internet would be so low that there would be no large business that could form. However one of the interviewers pushes back by saying that because the cost of distribution would be so low, aggregators would naturally form a monopoly on this business. Incredibly prescient point in a world of Facebooks and Googles. Anyone know who she is,…
Neither FB nor GOOG have become such monopolies in that type of business they were talking about. What Gates said hold true today.
Think for example about a one person business like daringfireball.net, that was the type of business Gates was envisioning. Or Drudge report.
Re: Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
#15"There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that". Netflix revenue last year was $11.6 billion. Fascinating interview.
I suspect there was a little rope-a-dope going on on his part. Microsoft was less than a year in to turning their ship around (https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/) to ride the Internet wave. So he wouldn't have wanted to telegraph to other large competitors that this was going to be huge. (hopefully, given their investments) They already had their hands full with all the tiny startups who had been there years earlier.
Re: Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
#16My main takeaway here was that Gates thought that the cost of distribution on the internet would be so low that there would be no large business that could form. However one of the interviewers pushes back by saying that because the cost of distribution would be so low, aggregators would naturally form a monopoly on this business. Incredibly prescient point in a world of Facebooks and Googles. Anyone know who she is,…
Neither FB nor GOOG have become such monopolies in that type of business they were talking about. What Gates said hold true today. Think for example about a one person business like daringfireball.net, that was the type of business Gates was envisioning. Or Drudge report.
>Neither FB nor GOOG have become such monopolies in that type of business they were talking about. What Gates said hold true today.
They're very close to that. And the same is true to other content, e.g. Spotify, Amazon Kiddle, Netflix for films, YouTube for video, etc.
People still go to other sources, but increasingly less so, and those sources all increasingly fringe (Daring Fireball? Compared to Facebook and the like?). Nothing like the wild west (and much freer and distributed) market it was 10 and 20 years ago.
Between the 3-4 big social aggregators for example, there goes 80% of the internet advertising pie.
Gates (as quoted below): "There will be no content club in my life time with $4 billion revenue...you are on drugs if you think that".
Meanwhile there are like 5 "content clubs" with much higher revenue...
[1] https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
Re: Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
#17At ~25-30 min they talk about "content club" as a business. The Wired guys propose this could be a +4$ billion biz. Gates laughs them off. Now, today we have the numbers: - As of May 2018, Apple Music had 50 million paying subscribers worldwide. https://www.statista.com/statistics/604959/number-of-apple-m... - Apple Hits $10B in Revenue From Services Like iTunes https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/apple-hits-10-bi…
This seems like a questionable comparison. Apple Music, et al. license content and there are few companies that are able to do this. This creates a barrier to entry that wasn't present for the "content clubs" Gates discusses. In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player.
>In fact, his primary point is that due to the lack of a barrier to entry in the market and no accumulating advantage of any kind, there wouldn't be a single dominant player.
Well, we have at best 2-3 "dominant players" in each field, so not much better. And doesn't already Kindle dominate in eBooks? Surely iBooks is not that much of competition.
Re: Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
#18My main takeaway here was that Gates thought that the cost of distribution on the internet would be so low that there would be no large business that could form. However one of the interviewers pushes back by saying that because the cost of distribution would be so low, aggregators would naturally form a monopoly on this business. Incredibly prescient point in a world of Facebooks and Googles. Anyone know who she is,…
The marginal cost of distribution is low, but the initial cost of getting all the content and setting up the infrastructure to deliver it is very high.
Re: Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
#19Wow, is this the original source? Such a low view count for what I feel is a very interesting look into a more casual Bill Gates. This seems much more spontaneous than the usual videos we see of him, and it's pretty cool to see the kind of thoughts he has before being filtered into prepared statements for the public.
Well if the interview was in 1996 and YouTube was created in 2005 I would say it was available elsewhere first
Also the YouTube video itself was just uploaded a couple of weeks ago.
Re: Wired Interviews Bill Gates (1996) [video]
#20My main takeaway here was that Gates thought that the cost of distribution on the internet would be so low that there would be no large business that could form. However one of the interviewers pushes back by saying that because the cost of distribution would be so low, aggregators would naturally form a monopoly on this business. Incredibly prescient point in a world of Facebooks and Googles. Anyone know who she is,…
Neither FB nor GOOG have become such monopolies in that type of business they were talking about. What Gates said hold true today. Think for example about a one person business like daringfireball.net, that was the type of business Gates was envisioning. Or Drudge report.
Craigslist?