Collapse of Complex Business Models

Clay Shirky writes a hell of an essay on the difficulties involved in doing things just a bit more simply, and why Big Media won't be pulling out of its death spiral any day soon, with side trips to 1990's AT&T and the fall of the Maya.

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”