Where is the real news?

This weeks ‘announcement’ from Sun and Google has got me thinking. Why is the IT industry so fixated with announcements? This announcement changes little, not because of its content but because announcements never change anything. Announcements simply indicate an intent t change something, and those changes are always incremental. Even if Sun and Google had announced a web based version of Office or whatever the big rumour was, it would still have been incremental, and for most people the increment would have been quite small. Within the industry we still like to foster this idea that we are radical and thrusting changing things overnight, but it just doesn’t work that way. Even the big things aren’t that big. Skype is big, in terms of numbers of people, but in terms of time used, is still very small for most people. Firefox is bog, in terms of numbers of downloads, but it’s still only a small percentage. RSS is big, but it’s about increments again. We have to start realising that we are not creating revolutions, we are creating incremental change, everywhere. Over time those increments build up to make significant changes, but a single announcement is only an increment.

It was while I was having these thoughts that the Read-Once DVD rumour/scam/hoax started. It kind of proved the point. More interested in hype than substance. Come on people, think about it, why would anyone want to buy a DVD that you can only read once, and how on earth could it be cheaper than ne that you can read more than once.

Here’s some real news for you. Software is changing every day – live with it. But the changes are incremental – live with it.