What happens when industries are slow to adopt the internet?
Newspaper-dot-coms aren’t living up to the promise of the internet. Yeah, and I don’t live up to plenty of my promises either. Big whoop — but, big difference. Unlike me, there’s a newspaper in every city, a newspaper that most residents of its community can name. It’s a commonly-known product, and the longer the lag between “what’s possible” and “what’s actual” at these newspaper-dot-coms, the more vulnerable their business model becomes.
I was reading Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture, which breaks it down like this: online information is changing from a thing that designers and information architects organized to a thing that the users (people) organize. And I thought, “Man, newspapers haven’t even made it to the architect-defined model.” Most newspapers still follow the information design of their printed product, which is seems to be a problem with getting comfortable and lacking-of-imagination. Most newspapers have yet to meaningfully engage their online community, much less organize information base on their community’s interests. I would say the time is now, but heck that’s probably been said off and on for the past six years.
So, what happens when industries take their time getting up to speed with the internet? Well, it depends on how acute the competition is. Which depends on how profitable and visible the industry is.