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Ecosystems come and go

Business

Your project doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your company wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the customers, competitors, marketplaces, systems and tech that make it all work.

I used to make almanacs. Long, detailed, fact-checked reference books that might save a trip to the library. When there plenty of bookstores and no internet, the almanac is an important resource and a useful business model.

I also had a division that made DVD roms for book publishers.

Neither project was likely or possible in 1920, and as the web took hold, both became unsustainable.

The ecosystem for board games was large, steady and profitable. The combination of toy stores and TV ads made it sustainable. And then, for most providers, it wasn’t.

The telegraph employed tens of thousands of people… and then it didn’t.

Google profited from building a huge search ecosystem and selling little slivers of it to advertisers. Many companies and projects thrived from the organic or paid traffic they got from billions of people doing a search. And now, it’s very clear that search traffic is way down, and will almost certainly never recover. AI has upended an ecosystem that many organizations assumed was normal and here to stay.

We can lament the end of an ecosystem. After all, we worked hard to get here and we counted on it. We’re comfortable with it and we understand it.

Or, we can accept that ecosystems come and go, and focus our energy on how the next ecosystem gives us a chance to do our work, new work, different work, but work that matters, for people who care.

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