14 DAY TRIAL // 10 years. In no less than 10 years, everything will be digital. The prediction was made by Microsoft Chief Executive Office Steve Ballmer during his address at the ANA Annual Conference in Phoenix, Arizona on October 12, 2007. Ballmer was forecasting the evolution of media and advertising from traditional mediums to becoming fully digitized. In a decade from now, in Microsoft's perspective, there won't be any more consumption of media, be it television or print, except that served through IP Internet technology.
"And will all be digital. I don't care whether you're sitting there watching your big screen, whether you think you're reading what we would have called a magazine or a newspaper in the old days; everything will be delivered digitally, delivered digitally, which means, in fact, that the forms of the creative, the creative in the media, the creative in the advertising, the technologies which will be available for targeting, will all be fundamentally different, and be able to be improved by software", Ballmer explained.
Ballmer offered a complex vision revealing that all mundane aspects of media will be impacted by the shift to exclusive digital materials. And in this context, there will be a thin and blurred line between various forms of content, that will melt into an overall digital category with little to no difference between text and video for example. But the hidden meaning between the continuing digitalization of today's media is that in ten years, the largest mass of advertising will also transition online. And in this sense, it still remains to be seen which entity will control Internet advertising. Currently, Google has the biggest potential, but Yahoo and Microsoft are not to be counted out of the race?especially the Redmond underdog.
"The notion that we have a rich database of information to use to deliver exactly the right message to exactly the right person at exactly the right time can be assumed in all communication. The notion that other forms of communication, personal communication, personal authoring, contribution, none of that will be separate from the consumption of produced media. So, this notion of all media going digital, it means all media will have interactivity, community. You will have so many new sources of media", Ballmer added.