Software interoperability can give lending a big fillip

A while back I wrote about John Philip Sousa and his opposition to Thomas Edison’s invention—recorded music. The point I made in that article was that Sousa’s angst with the phonograph was not an isolated incident. Such feelings have re-surfaced time and again, every time the music industry faced some new disruption—when tapes replaced vinyl records; when MP3s replaced CDs; and now when streaming music is threatening to upend the industry yet again.

Change of this sort is inevitable. Joseph Schumpeter called it “creative destruction”—the process of industrial mutation that revolutionizes the economic structure from within, destroying the old and replacing it with the new. Dynamic economies need to constantly renew and re-invigorate themselves, and creative destruction is how they do so.

In the early days of the internet, when technology systems were a lot more interoperable, creative destruction was the norm rather than the exception.