Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sat down for lunch with editors and reporters at the Washington Post and told them print will be dead in ten years:
There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.
I just hope the Post’s Website will still be around because it is a great distribution partner for TechCrunch.
But seriously, we’ve heard these predictions before. And it is easy to make them again with the print media industry suffering a major contraction as advertising dollars flee elsewhere. Just earlier this week, I was on a media panel at NYU where Vanity Fair media columnist and Newser founder Michael Wolff told Newsweek editor Johnnie Roberts:
If Newsweek is around in five years, I’ll buy you dinner.
It’s a good line, and in general Wolff was pretty much the only person I agreed with on the panel. Still, I am not so sure print is ever going away. Paper is a more enduring technology than Ballmer or Wolff would have you believe. What is endangered is the current set of business models that produce print media. If the those businesses go away, obviously so do their products. But that presumes that new print businesses won’t emerge to take their place. Maybe they won’t be as profitable and maybe they won’t have as broad a reach, but as long as there is demand for books, newspapers, or magazines somebody will figure out a way to fill it.
(You can watch more videos from Ballmer’s lunch here)
Nothing can match paper.
I hate reading my books on computer while listenning to the fan and the zzzzzzzzz emanating from the screen.
Yes, and OS/2 will be on every desk by when, 1995?
You guys get sucked in so easily. When it’s even remotely self-serving, it becomes a mantra. Try and get a way to remove the reality distortion field from your servers, k?
thats what they made the kindle for
I think that print won’t be around in its current form, but I think technologies like epaper and so forth will replace print the way we see it today. I’d say that traditional print volume in ten years will be 10% of what it is today.
i can put notes on my iPhone…but for some reason, Steve, a pen and a post-it is sometimes easier.
Paper will forever exist in everyday use, whether it be print media or literature.
Unless it is made illegal, or we colonize another planet (or island) where paper doesn’t exist, print media will find a way. It’s like what Jeff Goldblum said in the first Jurassic Park about procreation and life will find a way.
Ambitious and insane Steve…I’d expect nothing less from you. Kudos!
Erick - first, nice job on the panel on Thursday. I saw most of it and thought it was a great discussion. It was good to hear mainstream print see the writing on the walls.
As to Ballmer’s point, we’re heard this before. “Offices will go paperless.” “With the advent of computers, we’ll never use paper again.” So on and so forth. He should have also said “In ten years time, Live Search will be the only advertising platform.” That would have topped it all.
@Rivari - I have to concur. I’ll never give up a good paperback over my monitor. Talk about portable.
Many people still print out their emails and read them. Every one needs to step outside their own technology myopia and realize that there’s a large number of laggards out there still.
Newspapers have traditionally benefited from their ability to provide targeted, timely, advertising to a broad audience at a modest price. This allowed for their dominance in the classified and display advertising space. Exclusive provisioning of content was the product that built their audience. This proved to be a very lucrative spot in the value chain. Competition on being the source for content, will raise their audience acquisition and retention costs. Since, they generally have 5 to 8% operating margins and trade at P/Es of 10-15, they will have a very difficult time competing with online publishers.
Bill
amazon.com and s3 are down. go figure out why crunch buddies.
Its an accident that paper was discovered earlier than IP. It has infinite resolution, cheap, doesn’t strain the yes, no RSI, is light weight and doesnt need batteries.
and as far predictions go - “640k of memory is ought to be enough for anybody!”
I don’t know if Balmer is completely off his rocker, he’s just doing what Balmer does best, Hyperbole.
If you take a look at the Kindle it’s not everywhere but it is a hit. Think 10 years down the line and imagine Version 5 with a full color High resolution, high contrast OLED screen. Then imagine that the device was designed during the cold war. Then change Balmer’s prediction to 20 years and he might be right.
I can imagine these devices sold for Free or close to nothing as the Ad sales potential would be huge, just like magazines are today.
As Erick hit on in the article though, the old business model of Advertisers paying for the ads and consumers paying for the opportunity to read the content is old news. It’s going to be one or the other.
Oops… I meant that the device was NOT designed during the Cold War.
did we miss greetings…even after e-greetings
Better question: What will be around longer: print media or Steve Ballmer’s job?
Anton
..it will always be around but just not as cost effective to produce on a mass scale as electonic distribution.
If the rising cost of energy continues its meteoric climb this will be even more true especially with China, India and others competing for resources…
A similar pronouncement was made by Steve Jobs a few months ago:
But some people will find it difficult to transition into reading fiction on Kindle/iphone. But younger generations would much rather have textbooks on a portable device. They will drive the future, so maybe not in 10 years but 30.
http://www.treehugger.com/file.....-books.php
He went a little further, suggesting that people simply don’t read. I do think that technology allows us the option to more specifically define the best medium for transferring information. There are some things that may always be better communicated via paper (I can’t really think of any).
I predict the Ballmster will grow hair in 10 years.
News print will not go away, at least not within a small time period of 10 years.
I think NEWSPAPERS are on their way out, but it’s not due to the “print media” - rather, it’s due to the fact that they are, in general, losing the trust of their readers and aren’t adapting to a changing world.
PRINT, on the other hand, will stay around for a long time. People still like holding a book or magazine in their hands to read.
Amazon’s Kindle (or whatever it’s called) is how newspapers and magazines will be delivered.
Someone should tell Amazon to make deals with newspaper and magazine publishers.
Like Doh!
It’s a generational thing I think. I’ve noticed my kids and their friends are perfectly comfortable reading everything from a screen. In ten years, they become prime consumers. Without them, print cannot survive. As Erick mentioned, it’s more of an economic issue. At some point, with an eroding readership, print just can’t support itself.
I think the business model of the newspaper business must evolve in the next decade.
Otherwise we will be left with 30 large daily newspapers and USA Today for everyone else.
Newspapers will definitely be around in 10 years! Why? Simple: Look at the (older) generation that doesn’t use computers to read newspapers online. They won’t do so in 10 years either. And: They’re enough people to buy a few newspapers.
I’m sure that many newspapers will die, though, especially small ones. There will be two per category.
This is dumb thinking, which reminds me of Bill Gates. He said this stupid things all the time, too. He wasn’t right very often, I think. (I stopped taking his comments seriously before the first dotcom bubble.)
there are some things which cannot be digitally replicated. “Paper will die” is as easy to say as “home taping is killing the music industry” or “suffrage will lead to immorality” (and neither of those panned out, did they?) The noise that a newspaper makes when you fold it, the feeling of taking a book with you to the beach, the fun of sharing a tabloid at a nail shop are all reasons that print will remain. Will it be as ubiquitous? No, but paper has its own story and intrinsic value that cannot be underestimated.
its all bullshit. nytimes wall st journal etc. 10 years is not that long. they’ll be here, on paper. idiots
There is no way paper will be gone in 10 years, 20, or probably even 30. Aren’t we all suppose to have a paperless office? At my work, people have stacks and stacks of paper everywhere and it will never go away. Besides, I’m a web developer, I read off a monitor all day and the last thing I want is a tablet to read off of. The day we don’t use paper any more, is the day my car floats and zooms around, like the Jetsons. Lastly, there will always be room for a newspaper or magazine for me, what am I suppose to read when I poop!
paper will be gone and replace with an electronic medium that is just as versatile and convenient. ePaper, once it reaches a level of maturity, will be it. I rekon 10 years is a good estimate especially with whats at stake, i can picture the huge electronics companies all spending billions on research to be the first to deliver. Yep its gonna happen sooner than what people think!
There is magic in the printed word that you just can’t get from a computer. The smell of a book, the way it doesn’t hang up like Vista does, how you can curl up in your bed and read. How you can take it to the bathroom and escape your nagging wife.
I wish Techcrunch would have a button I could press where I could print off x amount of posts, so I would have something to read in the bathroom at work.
Ballmer obviously doesn’t understand sports addicts either because even though I still read ESPN, SI and sometimes Yahoo sports online, each day I will still get the newspaper for the sports section, I will get my SI delivered.
Why you might ask? Because I don’t have popup ads in my paper copy. I don’t have to sit up right in front of a computer.
Ballmer is likely missing the point that the magoirty of our population will still be the older demographic 10 years from now who prefer paper copies and always will.
The biggest reason why paper media is failing is because newspapers rarely give unbiased views anymore. More often then not they slant things to one agenda or another.
Lastly there is something plane sexy about sitting around the morning table with you wife, watching her read the entertainment section, wearing nothing but your shirt, eating toast and drinking coffee.
I think Steve really meant in a 100 years.
print media (print newspapers in bulk) will no longer be around.
I think he really meant to say 100 years but could not do so as thats not good for business, though I do suspect Microsoft plans to be around for a 100 years.
Print media/newspapers and books will return to the old days when only the elite could afford to have them. It will be very expensive and also be able to trade as gold, as some people do with limited comic editions (Superman, Batman, SpiderMan etc).
Can you imagine the price of a rare DC comic 100 years from now? or to bother order a printed book in hot demand that also has a release on the web? The same with print newspaper.
Technically they will suffer hard in 19 years as the net is really a cool place for text, pictures, and video in respect to reporting the news. Thus printed editions will be less frequent.
Just my views of course, no one really knows what the future truly holds.
Who knows, what if machines assisted by A.I decide to take over the word. Would man rather go back to the stone ages than to deal with the MATRIX? :).
Certainly the MATRIX would have some real enemies and print would be hard to tract information, unlike digital.
Absolute power and absolute control is the game of the MATRIX. Print offers an alternative.
10 years not 19
Name change. do not come too close.
formally “Senior Editor”
This year is also the year of mobile.
“Print is dead.” - Dr. Egon Spengler (Ghostbusters)
I believe that was 1984 and 14 years later, print is not dead and it wont be dead in 2018 either.
–anon
It’s not the model of reading newspapers on paper that’s dying, it’s the model of making money by selling them (or the advertising that drives them). Try to read your laptop, iPhone or other e-device on mass transit, at the counter of a restaurant, at dinner by yourself in a restaurant on a road trip, whatever, and you’ll quickly discover the ease, convenience and weight difference of a simple newspaper.
One of the serious problems that newspapers face in their financial model is the extremely high cost of distribution when compared with the cost of the item. It’s one thing for FedEx to deliver a $100 item to your house and another for the local route runner to deliver a $1 newspaper. The newspaper won’t go away, but the delivery mechanism might. Ballmer might be right in that sense (pardon me while I clean up the spittle after admitting that he’d be right about _anything_); the news”paper” might be delivered to your printer (yes, I know, this has been tried before, but well before semi-ubiquitous broadband and cheap color printers) and printed out for you on a daily basis instead of being delivered physically by a car/bike/truck.
But anyone who thinks that newspapers are going away within the next ten years needs to think about the _experience_ of reading a newspaper or magazine on paper as compared to reading it on an electronic screen. The advent of VCRs and DVDs scared Hollywood senseless (they are STILL senseless) as they became convinced that nobody would ever go to a movie theater again. Attendance may be down a little but that is probably more attributable to the rash of el-crapo movies than to a tidal change of people wanting to stay home instead of going to theaters.
Knowing what little I do about Ballmer I’m guessing that if he magically became CEO of the Tribune Company tomorrow he’d be saying that computers would all be off people’s desks in 10 years because they’ve discovered a better way to distribute information.
I suggest people take this one with a 10-pound bag of salt.
You will see a diminishing of print as part of the “eco/green” movement, however electronic will not completely replace print. People still like to read their reports in print and tear out the articles they like. To be sure, media consumption will change. Relevancy is the key. If print can become more relevant with its content it will be a viable media form factor well beyond 10 years.
I remember going to an e-book conference back in 2000, and recall an industry insider saying that “the day that books are paperless is the day all bathrooms are paperless.” or something like that.
Despite what Jobs says, people do read, and the publishing industry is a lot larger than the music and movie industry.
The only way Ballmer is right is if print publishers do nothing about it.
The print model needs to fundamentally change the way they do business. Their sales and ad operations are the last thing they are fixing and one of the biggest problems. Advertisers need to be able to transact business easily, quickly, transparently and with accountability. This can be done today for the most part with simple changes to processes and with electronic insertion orders and ecommerce.
“Print Tells the Washington Post That Ballmer is Toast”
There, corrected…
I do freelance video journalism that is uploaded to the web. I get 95% of my news from the web…. however, i don’t think print is gone in 5 or 10 years… but 40 or 50 years… yah, we keep getting more and more efficient, paper is inefficient
uh oh beware the prescient prognosticating powers of “the bull” Steve Balmer. Balmer, the same man who was adamant about his belief that the IPhone would not manage to garner a sliver of market share in the mobile phone market (oops!) I can probably go back 20 years pulling quotes from this “leader” (as well as his master Bill G) that were so naive and stupid and now proven false to make a great joke book out of them.
Needless to say I disagree with Balmer, and as Erick pointed out, the players in the space will indeed continue to see shrinkage, and unless they move with extreme alacrity toward diversification into online and mobile spaces they will see their revenues shrink as well, some will die but most of the big guys have bank rolls big enough to survive the transition.
Another development that might help the print publications a bit is the emergence of digital paper and the ubiquity of cheap colorful and flexible OLED displays. Imagine a display as thin as a sheet of paper , just as flexible but with a module that allows it to be loaded with the news of the day ….imagine still buying one of these and having it filled up with news before you leave for work every morning wirelessly. I am not talking Kindle here, kindle will feel like carrying around a blackboard written with stories and calling it portable compared to what is coming. These will be full color and have animation and video capabilities (since they will be dedicated to viewing there will be no need for the supplemental capabilities of a smart phone or PDA today) Also they will be rediculously power efficient thanks to those OLED elements. Such dedicated reading devices will be on the market in 5 years and will offer a replacement for the huge sunk costs of traditional print publications (ink and paper) …imagine newsweek, nyt, washingtonpost…moving to distribution on these new mobile and reusable digital formats allowing them to retain a good deal of their market positions today. Yes, hard times will continue to come for many of the print publication houses but the demand is still there for a semi disposable source of printed information and people will muster sufficient demand to make it viable for someone to keep providing it.
Print Media goes extinct? If not for serious reading, these newspapers and magazines are the regular companion to millions across the globe while they are on the move, and the comfort and convenience it gives not withstanding the information it passes on, has a tremendous effect and thus there is no room to panic. Nothing is going to happen and the ‘media’ is there to survive. I cannot visualise myself carrying a laptop or any such techy item to help me to read and relax. No mate, do not worry, print media is going to survive, because it is for serious reading as well as relaxed reading…
Without any doubt papers will survive. Newspaper companies ? Maybe not.
true and false. It definately will challenge the media organizations, but many will adapt, they have a huge audience, a lot of money, and will power to survive. I think print will survive also, but it will be more of a case of Media on demand. “newspapers and magazines” printed on demand, maybe still delivered to you door based on your explicit interests, and content subscriptions and content consumption behaviour analysis, but i do think the volume will be less, because busy, content saturated , information overloaded, born in the internet era people won’t tolerate the lack of searching , nor lack of rich video, interactive, and audio content. May epaper will get totally natural (i.e the direction the kindle is going , but far from there)
Forget that it is Balmer. Just think about the idea. Really this is an easy call. Making a device that “feels” as comfortable as book or magazine has not progressed as much as I expected but this is more of a chicken/egg problem. The current generation of devices such as the Kindle have been successful enough to make the electronics industry see this as the next killer app and once that realization is internalized then it won’t take that long for it to become reality.
As for folks (like my girlfriend) who swear that they will never give up paper books I will post back in plenty of time for all to get out of the way of falling debris once the swine are airborne.
“640 k ought to be enough for everyone”
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Not to mention the umpteen flying car predictions — Human level AI and flying cars always seem to be 20 years away.
How about some shorter term predictions, like will there be a yahoo a year from now?
Good points, but make it more generally
Maybe Steve was referring to exclusively print content, that will be gone? I would agree that print will become niche, but not completely out of the sight.
Good Post. Really Like It
Big Brother Is Watching.
print will die a slow death–maybe 20 years instead of 10. but why is this controversial? just because big media companies have so many properties doesn’t mean they’re not able to eventually get the digital media thing. once they figure out how to legally protect themselves, they go strong as evidenced by both music and movie progression and the downfall of napster.
people will then get the personalized content they desire electronically (as said above) on demand and media will be the harbinger of personalized content. eventually we’ll get our cars that way, too–and maybe our medicines. this isn’t science fiction, it’s fact.