Emily Bell in today's Media Guardian (free registration required):
… what we once took from Murdoch, as an industry and as media journalists, was his ability to provide a shockingly radical lead: he was the disruptive technology which now is itself being disrupted. … the next wave of thinking will inevitably come from elsewhere. … these next thinkers will be unpopular already - their ideas may well have been laughed at or rejected within successful organisations. They may be social misfits who are not comfortable in organisations and societies which regard their thinking as unworkable and eccentric. In other words they will be classic entrepreneurs who can remake businesses far quicker than a Microsoft or a News Corp can.
Who are these people? Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google now have a more profound daily impact on how the world communicates and what it consumes than either Murdoch or Gates. Their search engine software is forcing the mainstream media to rethink what they do with their content and threatens revenue streams we once regarded as untouchable. Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's List, who was in Britain last Monday to talk at an Oxford seminar, received far fewer column inches than Murdoch; yet his scruffy startup, offering free classified listings, has brought the local newspaper market in North America to its knees and threatens to do the same - or at least inspire the same - here. Meanwhile Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who were behind the powerful Kazaa file-sharing site, are now threatening the world's big telecoms companies with Skype, the internet telephony service bought by eBay.
The rise of this new generation of accidental entrepreneurs has been breathtaking in its speed, and the world they created through programming code is astonishing. Where will these developments lead us? Hard to say, but it is certain that the fog of the future will lift on a changed landscape, and in many ways it is sad but exciting that the old certainties - such as the value of Murdoch's instincts to the wider industry - have become outdated.
