I read a LinkedIn Post by David Linthicum, and it made me think about the way tech journalism used to be, how it is today, and why the change is bad for the industry. Yes, I know that most of my generation are justifiably criticized for being against change, but I’ve had a career founded in realism, and I’m really concerned.
I wrote my first article for a network publication, believe it or not, in 1982. It was a time when the early surveys of network professionals I did showed that a few key publications, especially Business Communications Review (BCR) were the most influential forces in network planning. I wrote for them regularly, and for a half-dozen print publications overall. None survive today. I used to publish a monthly newsletter (“Netwatcher”) which was for a time the longest continuously published newsletter on network technology. It’s no longer published. Technology publications these days are all online, and format of delivery isn’t the only difference. Not a single network professional out of over 800 who’ve commented to me in the last two years say that any of today’s publications are the most influential force in their planning.
What happened here? Does it matter? Both questions are complicated.
Tech publications when I started writing were transitioning from a paid subscription model to a qualified-recipient model. The mechanics of the former are obvious; you paid for the publication and so you received it. The latter approach involved filling out the once-ubiquitous reader-service cards, where you provided your job title and the budget you influenced, and the publication qualified you to receive it free, sponsored by advertisers who wanted to reach “influencers” in the purchase of their products or services.
Even before the dawn of online publications, in the early 1990s, the qualification approach was showing cracks induced by two basic issues. First, people who wanted to receive publications simply lied about their qualifications. Second, publications competing for advertisers wanted to boost their circulation, and so not only overlooked but encouraged “over-qualification”. I did surveys during the 1980s, and found that while in that period, the number of qualified points of network purchasing in the US grew from roughly 12,000 to roughly 14,500 during the decade, the number qualified according to reader-service cards grew from 15,000 to over 50,000. The total budget the latter claimed to influence was almost half the US GDP, which is obviously hardly likely to be true.
Even with this, though, the value of network technology publications remained high. The top pubs were number one through roughly 1985, and remained in the top three of the list of influences to planners for another decade. Things then entered the next era of content and influence evolution. Online content started replacing print in the early 1990s, as noted earlier, and it brought about three major changes.
The first change was timeliness became the priority. You didn’t have to wait for printing and delivery any longer; you could post an article immediately. It became clear that meant that people tended to seek out resources that got something up quickly, and that the increased use of search engines meant that something posted quickly would be crawled, indexed, and placed in the search results faster. You wanted a scoop, because the first story to appear was more likely to be clicked on, and ad revenue depended on getting served adds with those clicks.
The second change was that searching diluted publication loyalty. More and more online articles were found as a result of searching, rather than someone going to the publication website. SEO was more important than publication identity for the typical reader of an article.
The final change, mentioned in passing above, was that a click on the article link was the payoff for the publication, not whether the article was “useful”, “insightful”, or “referenced”. This, combined with the other points, meant that articles got shorter and less technological for the simple reason that this kind of stuff was easier and cheaper to produce, and paid off just as well. One result of all these forces was to reduce the value of “opinion” pieces in tech publications, in favor of news. That quickly made publications look more and more like summaries of press releases, and generated pressures on people like me who tried to go beyond that. I started getting editors telling me that I needed to explain a given acronym, one that anyone actually planning a project would have known well, but which the average tech reader, who wasn’t playing any role in project planning, might need decoded if they were to find the article through SEO. Do that in an article whose size was limited by tighter and tighter restrictions (from two thousand words, down to 800 or less) and there’s no room left to educate anyone.
All of this collided with a parallel shift on Wall Street. Companies used to be valued at some multiple of earnings, but tech was increasingly valued on the potential for people to buy the stock to cash in on future movement (yes, we still have that today). Stock analysts were famous for creating bubbles, and eventually regulators passed laws that made this sort of thing harder to do for stock analysts. By 2000, that meant that hype had to move to the tech publication space, where the forces I’ve cited above created a fertile growth medium.
Sadly, 2000 was roughly the end of the “obvious tech advances” period, in networking and elsewhere. We moved from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to smart handheld devices, and you couldn’t just assume that a new application was both justified by extending previous business-case paradigms and run on infrastructure whose principles had been evolving for four decades. We needed to educate the buyers on how to make this new world work…but who would do that?
Vendors hate educational sales, because the salesforce spent a lot of time just getting a prospect to the point of actually considering a purchase, at which point they’d likely put the deal out for bid and let competitors who’d watched them teach tech school now steal the benefits. In any event, the financial regulations that came in around 2000 (Sarbanes-Oxley, or SOX, notably) tended to focus the Street more on current results, so you had to make your quarterly numbers, not “sell futures”.
Education, though, had been a role publications had played well. Why not now? Well, you can’t educate someone in a new technology in 500 words. I used to regularly write 2,000-word articles for influential tech pubs, but nobody by the 2000s would take something that long. No vendor education, no education from the publications either. So what does that mean for tech?
So, a gradual shift from revolution to evolution. In 2000, slightly more than half the budget available for IT spending came from new projects, new business cases. Today, the percentage hovers around 12%. Over 80% of enterprises tell me that they have reduced the number of vendors, tended to stay with the tech model they had in place, because it was easier to justify. Modernization, the orderly maintenance of the role IT already plays, became the goal. If anything, you needed to reduce costs every year, somehow, because you couldn’t make new business cases easily. But if you’re not able to get comfortable with the new, how do you ever get out of the status quo? And just over-hyping doesn’t solve the problem, either. Instead, it focuses you on dabbling, on low-commitment paths to something like AI. Expense it, try it, walk away if it doesn’t make you feel good.
This, in my view, is what’s behind a lot of the challenges tech faces today. We need to open new business cases to justify spending growth, and that takes work, understanding. We can’t claim that enterprises trying to cut costs are always going to find ways of doing that while avoiding tech costs. Truth be told, it’s just as hard to prove that tech can reduce worker costs as it is to prove that tech could accelerate output or improve quality. This could turn into a race to the bottom, and it’s our own fault, including the media and the analyst communities, the advertisers and the editors and publishers.
All of this has led us to an industry more interested in building fables than in building value. What enterprises tell me they are doing, and what they want to do, and what they need to do, is totally different from what I read about online on mainstream sites. It’s even getting harder to find non-mainstream sites that talk about the things I hear are important, the things I know from my own software and network background are important. I can’t write those fables, only about what I hear and believe to be true. Others can, and of course AI can as well. I’ve been running an experiment on having AI generate an analysis of network technology announcements, and it faithfully follows the party line of hype as well as any PR type or human reporter would. Is this whole click fascination, then, paving the way for AI to replace people? Interesting thought.
The tech we knew can’t go on as it has for decades, in a world where only clicks matter, and that, my friends, is the absolute truth. We did better in the past, and that proves that we can do better again. I think we have to.
