Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong
From the introduction:
Bill Gates wrote a bestseller in 1995. He was on a roll: Microsoft Windows had finally crushed its old foe the Macintosh computer from Apple, Microsoft was minting money hand over fist, and he was hugely respected in the industry he had helped start. He roped in other big brains from Microsoft to write a book to answer the question, “what next?” The Road Ahead talked about the implications of everyone having a computer and how they would use the great Information Superhighway that was going to happen.
The World Wide Web appears in the index to The Road Ahead precisely four times. Bill Gates didn’t think the Internet would be big. The Information Superhighway of Gates’s fantasies would have more structure than the Internet, be better controlled than the Internet, in short it would be more the sort of thing that a company like Microsoft would make.
Bill Gates and Microsoft were caught flat-footed by the take-up of the Internet. They had built an incredibly profitable and strong company which treated computers as disconnected islands: Microsoft software ran on the computers, but didn’t help connect them. Gates and Microsoft soon realized the Internet was here to stay and rushed to fix Windows to deal with it, but they never made up for that initial wrong-footing.
At least part of the reason for this was because they had this fantastic cash cow in Windows, the island software. They were victims of what Clayton Christenson calls the Innovator’s Dilemma: they couldn’t think past their own successes to build the next big thing, the thing that’d eat their lunch. They still haven’t got there: Bing, their rival to Google, has eaten $5.5B since 2009 and it isn’t profitable yet.
I’m telling you this because libraries are like Microsoft.
Read this post and then re-read this post if you care about libraries.
I think he is spot on in his analysis but it is going to be up to you to find how libraries can be a value-add that is visible and vital to the general public. What difference do you make in their lives?
Before anyone flames me, let me point out that my wife is a librarian, my daughter (only child) is studying to be a librarian, I am adjunct faculty at a library school (GSLIS/UIUC), and have spent most of my life in libraries of one sort or another.
However, I do agree with Nat Torkington that libraries have an enormous value-add but they need to make that case in terms of the Internet and networking knowledge. Making the case for pre-Internet libraries is doomed to failure and dooms the libraries that make it.