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Barbarians at the gates
Alex Leslie - Feb 2, 08:04 AM
I am no historian but I do know that when the Roman Empire was finally – and as it turned out terminally – under immediate threat from very clever, audacious soldiers who would stop at nothing to get to the gates of Rome (including walking elephants over the Alps) the Romans responded with a PR campaign. They called them names – barbarians. Oddly, the name stuck. The barbarians still won, of course, leaving almost five hundred years of the most astonishing empire on earth in a pile of ashes and empty wine bottles.
It is interesting to me that the history of empires can be mapped so neatly onto the history of companies. Both go through stages of outburst and energy – a small band of vastly passionate people will do things that conventional wisdom says cannot be done. They will attract followers, then they will become more organised, they will focus as much on logistics and support for their endeavours as on conquering new countries and regions. Then the energy and support for expansion at any cost dissipates. A new generation of managers arrives with a view to secure what has been won, to account for everything that is used and only go to war for strategic, mainly defensive reasons. In the world of empires an era of decadence sets in at this point and although this is not generally so true of companies I have heard stories of Christmas parties that sound pretty decadent to me.
And then someone else starts up. The new upstarts with the energy and the will and the passion start doing things that cannot be done. And the companies that are now the establishment try to defend themselves against them – first with armies (of lawyers), then with arms and finally with PR and marketing.
The question therefore is this: Is Rupert Murdoch and his empire ‘old Rome’? Is his recent ‘victory’ with Google the Gatekeeper and the matter of content kleptomaniacs a small battle in a war against barbarians. If so, it is a war that will flip the switch that controls the world from ‘closed’ to ‘open’?
And what of Google – what will Google do, what will it be when it grows up? I do not know except that it is in my opinion in the phase of securing its defences – but against what? Read this analysis from Wharton.
Perhaps against Twitter and Facebook, the two most powerful search engines (and democratic enablers, fund raisers, truth seekers) on earth.
I have been using Twitter for some time – using it I am afraid to shamelessly promote BillingViews and its stunningly valuable content (I am biased). Then I find that people are following me. Then I find that some of those people are very interesting people. I find their tweets lead me instantly to stuff that I find provides great insights into things that I would need to spend hours of sifting through Google hits to find.
In short, Twitter allows me to read what the people that I admire read. It is a recommendation and search engine of the most powerful kind. It saves me time, it takes me to content that I really need to get to – and it bypasses Google.
Which poses the question – are Google and Rupert Murdoch actually in the same boat? Are the barbarians of Twitter and Facebook and Who Knows What Else at the gates?
Is ‘open and connected’ the new world order (sorry, how do we police that?) Are we witnessing the end of control?
This, you may say, has nothing to do with billing – except this: with so much uncertainty, so many empires on the edge of failure and so many more on the road to riches, who bills who for what?
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