It's been something like six months since the launch of the Times Reader, which I dissed as Microsoft's deja-vision of the future. Now Hearst, which owns the troubled Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has lined up with the dark side, announcing its own downloadable reader. Similar announcements have come from Forbes and London's Daily Mail.
Silicon Valley VC Alan Mutter rightly calls this a case of "trying to jam the square peg of the traditional print product into the round hole of the Internet."
In Clayton Christensen's terminology, this is not only cramming, but overshooting.
Cramming is the act of forcing an old product or business model into a new technological framework, rather than exploiting the new framework for its unique possibilities. Christensen writes: "The problem with cramming is that it changes the innovation in ways that obviate its inherent disruptive energy. It takes an innovation from a circumstance in which its unique features are valuable to a circumstance in which its unique features are a liability.
"Cramming is like trying to stuff a square peg into a round hole. "
As for overshooting, that's the act of "improving" a product in ways that exceed the marketplace's ability to absorb the "improvement." Microsoft is all puffed up about its newfound ability to hand extraordinary typographical control over to the publisher. The problem is that readers are not crying out for better type kerning from an "online newspaper." That's really, really not the problem.