By the way, I solved the problem of battery life and [the lack of] multitasking on the iPhone.

Really?
Yeah. I just have two iPhones, so if the battery runs down on the first one, I can use the other. And if I’m talking on one, I can use the other one to look something up. You would not believe how much use I get out of that.

-Woz interviewed by Newsweek

http://www.brighton.ac.uk/bbs/news/witchhazell.php

It scares me to realise but it was 14 years ago that I was hired at Ziff Davis UK, publishers of PC Magazine UK and PC Direct, both sadly RIP. I was the first of a new team that was going bring ZD into the modern era of the Internet. As Electronic Contents Editor at PC Direct I was mainly tasked with building websites but I got stuck with sourcing the monthly cover CD too – a situation that encapsulated the state of publishing at the time. In my head I was there to change the way ZD did things and sourcing shareware for the cover CD every month was a hit I was prepared to take. But another very real way of seeing my job was doing ‘anything that’s not print’ so that everyone else could get on with producing a magazine.

There was noticable resistance to online in those days, even at a technology publisher. The staff wanted to stick to what they knew and were good at. And the brass didn’t see why they should invest in a team to develop for the unproven Web when they were earning tidily from a heavy presence on CompuServe and AOL.

I found a gem of Newsweek column from 1995 that sums up the mood at the time. I liked it so much I stole its title.

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

…

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Takes you back doesn’t it? You can almost hear the analogue handshaking as you established your blazing 33.6 Kbps connection.

It was the same at ZD. Sure they had to focus on the bottom line but some senior editors honestly believed that the Internet was never going to catch on. Interesting, sure. Really useful? No. They thought I was kidding when I said they’d be working for me in ten years. True enough, none of them have sunk that low but the publishing industry has fallen to the point where they have to look at new ways of doing business.

Cue the iPad. For what it’s worth I’m with Fake Steve on this one – it’s a nice enough device but what was supposed to put it over the top was a series of iTunes-like media deals that were going to breathe new life into publishing. I can understand why it didn’t happen that way — the music industry is controlled by  4 or 5 companies so you can make big, secret deals. Publishing has a lot more players so approaching too many companies before launch would have ruined the surprise. As it was some people said more than they should. But now that the world knows about the iPad the content deals can begin in earnest.

Of course, letting Apple save your industry comes with its own set of problems but I’ll get back to that in a future post. The wider issues of the publishing industry having difficulties getting used to a new medium have been put in the shade with the news that the New York Times is still fighting the same turf war that was going at ZD in 1996.

Gawker reported and ran a follow-up about how the old guard at the NYT want to charge $30 per month for an iPad subscription – the same amount as a print subscription even though there are no printing and physical distribution costs (in fairness some of that will be replaced by the “Apple tax”). It makes even less sense given that you can already buy a subscription to the electronic version for $15 per month. It’s crazy and has to be based entirely on the perception that they have to cripple the new to keep doing the old.

Looking back at that Newsweek article you can understand the resistance in 1995. The Web was a slow, unattractive system that lacked the interactivity and social elements of today’s Internet. You sure couldn’t carry it with you in your pocket. Predicting the the triumph of the Internet required a degree of optimism back then that simply isn’t required any more.

I don’t live my whole life online – but I communicate, I research, I buy and sell things, I market my business and I make my living helping other people do it too. We’re able to provide incredible value to customers compared to traditional marketing methods. And the takeup is amazing. It’s been easy to prove to businesses that these methods work, cutting costs and creating new business for all kinds of companies. Whenever I proposed new ideas at ZD I knew in advance that the reply would be ”Show me the money”. It took a few years but in 2010 that’s an easy debate to win, something that should be noted at places like the NYT.

Whatever else the iPad does, it has shown how we still straddle the divide on how to perceive and use technology. Maybe it’s greatest achievement will be to finally free us from 1995.