Bill Gates pronounces Print Yellow Pages Dead (again)
The Praized Blog » Blog Archive » Bill Gates: Print Yellow Pages Will be Dead in Five Years:
Sebastien over at the Praized blog wrote today about Bill Gate’s comments on the 5 year death rattle of the print yellow pages.
It’s not the first time Gates has taken on the YP industry (can anyone say “Sidewalk?”), but clearly the winds of change are blowing.
What Microsoft fails to recognize is that local advertisers are a tough bunch, and having a better mousetrap (phone trap?) is not the answer to success.
The companies who provide a comprehensive solution for delivering leads to the local advertiser will be in the driver’s seat.
Hey, I still use wooden #2 pencils when better technology (ball point pens, computers, etc.) are available.
It reminds me of 1988 when I was managing a small department store in Loogootee, Indiana. Wal-Mart put three massive stores within a 35 mile radius.
Despite our 109 year history, we closed the store.
Wal-Mart simply diverted enough revenue that it was no longer profitable to operate.
Publishers will need to employ their sales teams to provide multiple products to remain relevant to the advertiser.
Microsoft will need to learn local sales.
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May 10th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Read his book,”The Road Ahead” (1995) to see how accurate his predictions are. While few would dispute that Gates is a genius, he is no better a forecaster of the future than the ordinary meterologist or economist is at predicting the weather or the economy years from now.
May 15th, 2007 at 4:53 am
It’s funny how this conversation has come up over the last 15 years or so, but nobody really answers the hows & whys for their predictions.I have found that everyone who believes in this theory is normally an extreme webhead. I am an obvious user of the great internet but also a publisher of yellow page directories, when asked about this theory my answer never varies. I believe that the web is a fantastic place to get your news & research products & prices I use it for that very thing myself. The yellow pages is a service directory and by the way the most boring book in the world people do not just sit around reading their phonebook,(they grab it when they are ready to buy or need more information), but always keep it handy so that when they need something it’s there.If you come home at the end of the day to find that it is not only 100 degrees outside but inside your home as well. Do you go over & turn on the computer enter your password let it boot up, then click on your search engine & type in air conditioning contractors for your local area. People are usually laughing by this point, because you’d grab your phone book & have made the call in this amount of time, and that’s why there will always be your local phonebook, at least I hope so because people like me who type with 2 fingers searching for something local on the web is a challenge.
Andy Baker