Within most businesses crisis drives innovation. Within technology, business innovation leads to crisis.
Privacy crisis, IP crisis, security crisis and financial crisis are just a few conflicts to name.
Let us take the newspaper business. All was fairly well for the newspaper business until a time when consumers believed that news could be free- thanks to the internet. The feeds on Twitter page themediaisdying unfolds the turmoil in the industry in a "drip-drip" format. Newspaper publishers are seeking to revive themselves by retreating free content online.
However, such a retreat comes too late after the information explosion on the internet. The proliferating information on the internet is not easily controllable.
Newspapers that currently charge for some of its content find that the articles are accessible via Google news.
The online business model is not as simple as the selling of physical newspapers is. Some subscribers are likely to share the log-in details and the number would be too less for detection. Others would post the news stories they read online on to their Facebook and Twitter accounts to share and discuss it with friends.
The world wide web is just that - a world, wide, web that caches, tags, stores, crawls, spreads, reproduces and displays the information once it lands there.
In the world of technology, free and open source have always triumphed over pay-for and proprietary software. And the internet users think it could be the same for every business.
Ailing newspapers must simply join the bandwagon and perhaps begin to nudge the likes of Google (or broadband providers), who are gaining from consumers' free-content campaign, for support.
Meanwhile, benign consumers hope such a plan won't backfire at them.
But, by the time, a solution is devised, technology would have moved one-step ahead where consumers would prefer mobile computing and e-readers and its providers will offer complementary news services, leading to a new crisis.
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