Treating the internet as another broadcast channel guaranteed failure for media entrants.

Evidence

In effect, Microsoft treated the Internet as if it were merely a new channel on which it could broadcast content, as if what had been invented was an extension of cable television. But the impulse was not altogether misguided, for someone was going to make money selling all of the attention the Internet was capturing. It just wasn’t going to be Microsoft. The most successful contestant would be the one that truly understood the new platform and how it would be used. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 869

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the pattern from later platform disrupter stories and the general thesis of The Attention Merchants: whoever masters the new attention medium wins. Connects to the reader’s attention-industry historical grounding. — connects to: Content reform could not escape television’s foundational attention-resale model — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 583
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth’ and ‘On Sacrifice’ only loosely, but strongly supports a potential piece on how incumbents misread new attention platforms as extensions of old ones (Microsoft-as-cable, newspaper-as-web).

Broader Connections

• Content reform could not escape television’s foundational attention-resale model #complicates (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 583