The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy

Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic

June 15th, 2008

Steve Ballmer Forecasts the Death of Print Media

I am still reeling from Steve Ballmer’s atrociously ill-considered remarks to The Washington Post  (Ballmer, as most recall, is CEO of Microsoft, when Bill G. is not at home) that “there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines…

June 5th, 2008

Barack Obama and the Future of Publishing

As I watched the news reports on Tuesday evening indicating that Barack Obama had captured the Democratic nomination for president, I quipped to myself, “Time for a new blog entry called ‘Barack Obama and the Future of Publishing’.” But, I thought, I didn’t recall publishing as a theme of his campaign — I couldn’t recall…

June 4th, 2008

The Future of Printing at drupa

Every four years in Dusseldorf, Germany an enormous printing trade show, called drupa (standing for Druck Und Papier [in German: printing and paper] gets underway. According to the official press release, “With 1,971 exhibitors from 52 countries spread across an exhibition area of over 175,000 square metres and an anticipated 400,000 visitors from around the globe,…

June 1st, 2008

Michael Crichton’s 1993 Prediction of Mass-Media Extinction Now Looks on Target

More credit where credit is due: I was alerted to this provocative May 2008 column on Slate.com by Bob Sacks in his Heard on the Web — Media Intelligence newsletter. Back in the prehistoric era, i.e. 1993, mega-bestselling author Michael Crichton wrote an article for Wired magazine called Mediasaurus. In the article he made several…