Horace Dediu writes about the law of new media: “Once you change the method of distribution, the product has to change.”

Fundamentally, you can’t move an existing media to a new network. You have to think of it as a deeply rooted-in system, and it’s just not going to like moving to another environment. You have to uproot this huge tree, and it just won’t come out and if it did it will not take root in a new place.

The only way to create this new value network around new distribution is to plant a new tree.

I have never seen it put this way before but makes me think about all the products that were dominant in the PC era, of which handhelds were literally just a shrinking of, to today’s world of ultra-connected, always on, pocketable computing. How do products like Word and Excel work in this new world? Is Google’s strategy of moving very similar copies into the cloud resolve the “product change” problem? How about using them on tablets and smartphones? The same UI, as Microsoft is proving with Windows 8, doesn’t work. Do these products need to be re-invented from the ground up? Or are the products fine but need a different business model?

When I say “shrinking,” by the way, I don’t mean this from a product design perspective. I mean this from a distribution and business model perspective. Handhelds were sold the same way PCs were sold and handheld software was basically sold the same way desktop software was sold. This began to change with the rise of cellphones and smartphones, starting with the carriers taking control of both and eventually app stores dominating software sales. The method of software distribution has changed.

When I read Horace’s best work, I’m often confronted with more questions then answers, not just about the technology market but specifically about my own business. This post resonates with me very strongly.

Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Exchange and Fog Creek Software as well as the popular blogger writing Joel on Software, gave a very interesting presentation at Startup School. In it, he talked about two startup options, grow big fast or organic growth, and broke down the two. This has been done before but I’m including his list of differences here:

The interesting part is the part at the end. In short, Joel said the worst thing you can do for your business is fail to decide which category you are in.

He’s done both. Fog Creek Software is a grow slow business. It built itself from customers and consulting and is now a 40+ person company spitting out cash. Stack Exchange, on the other hand, is a grow fast company. It needs network effects to lock in its customers.

What really struck me as interesting is that Joel recognized very early that Stack Exchange was a get big fast business but waited two years before raising venture capital funding. He proved there was a customer base there first, proved that it could indeed grow fast, and then raised money from a few VCs that he specifically targeted. His round, he said, was done in two weeks. That history is repeating itself with Trello, a project management service from Fog Creek Software. This time, though, instead of raising VC money, the project is being funded by Fog Creek profits.

So which is it? Grow big fast or organic growth? While the former takes all the headlines, it’s the latter that makes the country go.

Warren Ellis gave a fascinating talk on seeing the future:

Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

Too bad this wasn’t a commencement address. Would have been one of the best I ever heard.

Jason Fried of 37signals fame, on a meeting with Jeff Bezos:

He’s observed that the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a well formed point of view, but it means you should consider your point of view as temporary.

Strong opinions held loosely.

Alexis Madrigal had a very interesting article in The Atlantic last Friday. In his article he talks about there really being two social “networks,” one is the one that gets all the hype, led by Facebook and Twitter, and the other is what he dubs “dark social” networks, or those that can’t be tracked. Included is email, instant messages and the like. It turns out that 57% of The Atlantic’s traffic and 70% across Chartbeat’s media partner sites are referrals via dark social media. Chartbeat is the company tracking data for The Atlantic and others.

If you think optimizing your Facebook page and Tweets is “optimizing for social,” you’re only halfway (or maybe 30 percent) correct. The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There’s no way to game email or people’s instant messages. There’s no power users you can contact. There’s no algorithms to understand. This is pure social, uncut.

So the social web (web 2.0) revolution didn’t create social, as Alexis points out, instead it structured it and made it trackable.

We optimized powerOne to share via email. While we technically have the ability to know how much it is used we aren’t tracking that data. It would be interesting to know. Furthermore, and again under the heading of “can’t possibly know,” it would be interesting to know how much of powerOne’s success has come from one person showing another person the app. I hear from customers all the time who say they tell everyone they know about the app. Given the amount of conversation on Twitter about it, email and word of mouth has got to be huge.