The old mantra was that "Content is King" but that's changing quickly and it's now more true to say that "Content Access is King." The software applications that put the content in front of the user is what determines the winner.
In the overall evolution of the mobile app market, the open web, and the semantic web one irony is that while content is becoming more accessible, more accessed, and more widely used the seeming importance of the actual content is going down. Consumers have always thought of the content access tool as the product, not the content itself. When it was difficult to get to the content repositories, the Bloomberg terminal, LexisNexis green screen, and the CompuServe dial-up software were the product and there was no way to get to the content without going through the access platform.
The internet and search engines started the trend - consumers did a search and got results and never knew that the content was not owned by Google or Yahoo - and did not think about the quality, accuracy, or completeness of the search results because they were much more focused on the ease of access. This trend accelerates with newer internet applications and the Mobile Internet in particular. Users, consumer and professionals, will buy the apps that give them access to content - regardless of the content source. Yelp! and Urban Spoon replaced Zagat because it was easy to find and contribute reviews on your mobile device, not because the content was better or more complete than Zagat.
To compete in this industry today information services companies must:
- Continue to make your content better - try to maintain the Accuracy, Completeness, and Timeliness gap between proprietary content in captive repositories and the Free Content so that the upstarts stay at 80% solutions (or go down, not up)
- Innovate and deliver the world class applications and access points that consumers want. Incumbent information providers need to create rich mobile, always on, easy-to-use apps that make it easy to find, read, and contribute content from any device at any time that consumers like to use and promote to their friends. Rich User Experience, cutting edge software development.
- Open up your content repositories through APIs to get your content used by new innovators. Embedding your content in the largest social media applications, the new local apps, and every entrepreneur's crazy new idea gets your content in front of new users and new customers. By making it easy to use your content in new ways and new ideas, you also forestall the creation of even more competitive content sources and make your content the preferred choice for every new innovator.
- Overhaul your content supply chain. Make it nimble, make it flexible. New content sources, new content enrichment, new content integration. Faster, cheaper, and better.
More sophisticated customers may realize that free or smaller content providers do not meet the very high Accuracy, Completeness, and Timeliness hurdles that Professional information workers have. But they will still buy and use the easy-access mobile solutions to get access to the 80% content anywhere and all the time. As the 80% solutions get better (85%, 90%, ...), the professionals may decide they don't need to pay full price either.
Most ironically, the more content providers try to lock up their content, the more it will become commoditized -- startups who make great software products using a free content source because it's available and easy to use convince customers that the free content is good enough. There goes your proprietary brand and content differentiation.
