Every writer finds a way to use the title Everything Old Is New Again at some point in his or her writing career. Today is my day!
Is it possible to read a blog, a newspaper or magazine, visit a website, or talk to anyone under the age of 23 without hearing about MySpace.com? Ever since News Corp. (NWS)bought MySpace's parent company for 580 million dollars, there is no escaping hearing about it daily. People are acting like it is a new invention. I guess nobody noticed that it is very similar to how people used the personal website pages on AOL (TWX) in, oh, about 1998! Let's see: people had personal pages to which they added pictures, talked about themselves (even called that a profile), listed their "buddies" and posted links to their friends' sites...is any of this sounding familiar?
Anyway, it reminds me of a conversation I had with a retiring corporate executive a while back about Purchasing. We were in the throws of a "strategic Sourcing initiative," which resulted in uproar throughout the company as we focused on "vendor consolidation" as a major goal. As she packed up her office and shook her head with a sigh, she told me that the whole thing made her laugh!
Of course, I asked why she thought it was funny. She said that she had been heavily involved in the creation of the official Purchasing department at the same company (this is where she had spent her entire career) 25 years earlier. At the time, they were going through the same exact sourcing exercises we were going through with the exact same reactions throughout the company. She said that 25 years ago, they called it "single source vending."
There you have it - Everything Old Is New Again.
Comment Preview