by Flemming Funch
Robert X. Cringely has excellent advice for the music, film and print industries. His column is always well researched and argued. Here he has some excellent analogies about how monopolies fight change, in part by pretending to deliver what people want, but doing it really poorly."My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic -- and occasionally military -- force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother of searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop." So, likewise, the music or movie companies are likely to come up with their own peer-to-peer solutions for media distribution. They will be expensive and they won't work very well, but they might slow their own demise.
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