I should be filthy, reeking, rolling rich. No, really, I should. It was 1994. Mark Zuckerberg was still in grade school, mucking about with his dad’s computer. Apple computers were called Macintosh, and their cute, boxy shapes cluttered the media room of the graduate communications program of New York University.
I was there on a scholarship right at the moment this thing called the internet and the true information age was about to take off, and I remember there being a lot of talk about all that. I just didn’t put all the pieces together.
The university signed me up to this new email thingy they were offering all students: it was a way of writing to people via computer. It looked pretty interesting, in a clunky DOS kind of way, but no one I knew back in Australia had it, so I logged on once but never used it again. Somewhere out in cyberspace, is an original US-based “.edu” email address owned by me. Do you reckon that’s worth anything?
One of our professors was insistent about the way the world was going to change. Your television won’t be just a television anymore, he said. You will have screens of all kinds in your home and they will just be the monitors that you use to access information on everything: entertainment, news, weather, interactivity.
Information will come to you via pipes of all descriptions, he said. Don’t get caught up on what the hardware will be – it’s going to be all about the content. And everybody is going to want content. Just last weekend, as I called up iTunes on my Apple TV and downloaded House of Cards I thought about that. I was there at the beginning, and asked by the university to do something with my unique position in history. But I didn’t.
Content has turned out to be king: the phenomenon that is HBO (Home Box Office) is a great example.
Here’s another of my missed opportunities: as I was chatting on to admen Harold Mitchell and Russel Howcroft in my ABC radio studio, thinking how interesting an analytical discussion of advertising could be, the creative heads at Andrew Denton’s Zapruder productions were listening too, but with bigger things on their minds. I think of that every time I sit down to watch Gruen. Damn.
I’ve come across a brilliant online stationery and delivery store, where cards, mail and invitations of all kinds can be designed and posted for a fraction of what it costs on paper. Genius idea, one this enduring snail-mail fan should have thought of. But I didn’t.
It takes a certain kind of person to take the brilliant idea to the next level: the imagination to see the possibility; the drive to see it succeed; the application and tenacity; the entrepreneurial spirit to source funds to make the idea a reality. I’m only now beginning to realise I have none of these skills.
But I’m hoping it’s not too late. Having realised the opportunities I have let slip – I could have written The Newsroom if I really wanted to, you know – surely self-awareness is the first step to success. I’m looking to identify, specify, actualise and commercialise something that I’m quite sure is going to be the Next Big Thing. I’ll let you know when it happens. To me or someone else. \
» Just for fun, check out Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric trying to come to grips with the internet in 1994. Those were the days …
