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There is a lot of hype about how the pace of technological change is leaving
businesses and governments behind. It has become received wisdom that the
failure of legacy companies to survive the internet era is a result of them not being
fast enough in responding to such giddying change. This is generally nonsense.
Tom Coates, an internet pioneer who worked at the BBC, called this out in a
blogpost written in 2006. Writing of media companies terrified by the hardly novel
insight that broadband might end up killing traditional TV, he compares them to
being pursued by a giant snail. It’s not a fast mover, yet they cannot get away. ‘The
snail! The snail!’ they cry. ‘How can we possibly escape?’ As Coates points out, ‘the
problem being that the snail’s been moving closer for the last twenty years one
way or another and they just weren’t paying attention’. Many large organisations
have watched the internet approach and refused to adapt. Survival is apparently
optional.