Here's a thought provoking article by Tim O'Reilly - Radio Forgets To Pay The User First. The radio situation is very true (as are others such as free to air TV in my country) and while satellite radio is not applicable in my country (and probably most others outside the USA) I think the iPod was the disruptive innovation here. Since I've had a good iPod in-car solution (about 18 months ago) I have just about stopped listening to radio at all. From a long term 100% of the time (in car) listener to less than an hour or two a month (on average).
The analogies that can be drawn are many and remembering to focus on your customers - to pay the users first - is the best and strongest to what we do in software development.
Back to radio and similar - podcasting is a small glimmer of hope here though.
Web 2.0 from Tim O'Reilly - Another story
Interesting to read such article by Tim O'Reilly. It's also interesting how he is beating the drums for Web 2.0 (his baby). My experience with him is kind different.
I had an email exchange with him, concerning O'Reilly's eBook availability. When you want to purchase a O'Reilly book in eBook format you must do it through O'Reilly's safaribookonline.com channel. Instead of simply purchasing the whole book you are limited to single chapter downloads by not more than 4 chapters per month. I sent him an email and asked him why: "Tim O'Reilly is trying to take the piss out of me!" Does he really think that I as a user sit there and download one eBook over a time period of several months?
When one talks about such noble things like in Web 2.0 why is he not acting like that?
A lengthy discussion
I should mention that Tim and I had a lengthy discussion on that eBook issue.