 Back in the late 1980s, Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC, world's second largest computer manufacturer, behind only the 500 pound gorilla of the industry, IBM. See, back in these days, if you wanted to use a computer, your first had to clean out your basement, and then you would have to get in line behind all the other people who wanted to use the computer. Computing power was really precious, and it was rare and expensive. And so DEC made its mark on the field with its line of what it called mini computers, like this sexy badass right here, the PDP-8. So with the PDP-8, for the first time, an individual engineering department could have its own computer, or maybe an individual academic department could buy one. Even like an individual theater troupe could buy one of these things and use it to run the lights. This is Ken Olson, he's their CEO. Look how happy he is. Doesn't he look happy? He's really happy, right? And why shouldn't he be happy? He's the CEO of the world's second largest computer manufacturer. He has a track record of research and innovation. He has his finger on the pulse of the market. He deeply understands what his customers want, and he feels confident that there is no reason for anyone to have a computer in their home. I mean, why would you want that? It goes against everything that he knows about how people use computers. And it sounds a heck of a lot like all the people who tell me, well, there's no reason anybody's gonna wanna do that on mobile. I mean, why would you wanna do that? It goes against everything we know about how people use the web. Okay, so I want you to imagine it. It's 1988. DEC has moved on from their historically successful PDP line of mini computers to their even more successful line of Vax computers. This is the Vax 11, first mini computer with a 32-bit architecture. They are also selling the VT125 integrated graphics terminal. This is hands down the most popular terminal that has ever been made. This thing is fantastic. It can do custom fonts. It can do charts and graphs. Rainbows shoot out of these things. Look how happy this guy is here. Doesn't he look happy? Okay, you can't tell how happy he is because of the big magnum PI mustache, but I assure you, he could not be happier with the VT125 integrated graphics terminal. And so you just have to imagine their vantage point sitting here in 1988. They are at the top of their field. They have their best selling products in history. And there is absolutely no reason for them to believe that their entire market is gonna be destroyed by one of these cheap pieces of crap. I mean, look at them. This is not the VT125 integrated graphics terminal. This is a black and white television set from Radio Shack. This is not the Vax 11 32-bit architecture. It's a cassette tape. It stores its memory on a cassette tape. It's only got the one dumb little rainbow. Rainbows don't even shoot out of these things. 1988, DECA's the world's second largest computer company. They're the second largest employer in the state of Massachusetts behind only the state government. 1990, just two years later, they post their first quarterly loss and they start firing people. 1991, they post their first full year loss. They would lose money in five out of the next seven years. And in 1998, just a decade later, they're gone out of business acquired by one of the manufacturers of the personal computer. This has got to be some crazy fluke, right? I mean, this has got to be completely unprecedented in the history of business. There's just no way that Ken Olson could have ever anticipated that something like this would happen, right? Wrong, in industry after industry, the new technologies that brought the big established companies to their knees, they weren't better, they weren't more advanced, they were actually worse. The new products were low end, dumb, shoddy, and in almost every way, inferior, almost. Clayton Christensen had a theory and he called it disruptive innovation. And what this theory says is that disruption happens from the low end. New products come on the market and even though they do not compete in any respect with their predecessors, they do one thing and they do that one thing really well. They put that technology into the hands of a market of people who never had access to it before. And this has happened time and time again. Like, say it's the 1930s and you're the manufacturer of these gorgeous furniture radios, you know? They're a rich piece of craftsmanship, they have this rich, resonant sound. You imagine that you're gonna gather your family around you in the evenings and you're gonna listen to music or radio programs, it's an heirloom that you wanna pass down to your children. Except your teenager buys one of these cheap pieces of plastic so she can take it to the beach. Transistor radios weren't better, they were cheap, they were made of plastic, the sound quality was tinny, you couldn't tune them. But what they did is they allowed a population of teenagers in the 1950s to get access to music of their own. And that was more important to them than the quality of the sound. And so what happened was in just a decade or two, the quality of the transistor radio got good enough so that now nobody needed to buy a big piece of furniture to sit in their living room. The names of the craftsmen that lovingly built these furniture radios, who knows who they were? Their names were lost to time. The name of the company that put out the first transistor radio, they were called Sony. So you can see where I'm going with this, right? We are witnessing right now the latest wave of technological disruption in the same way that many computers came along and disrupted the market for larger mainframes and in the same way that the personal computer came along and disrupted Dex's market for many computers. Today, mobile devices are disrupting the market for larger personal computers, and they are doing so because they are putting computing power into the hands of people, they're putting access to the web into the hands of people who previously never had it. The digital divide is real. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the digital divide is something that's limited only to the developing world. But in fact, it happens right here in places like Sweden or the UK. Up to 20% of the population doesn't have access to the internet. In countries like Spain or Portugal, it can be as high as 50 or 60%. The numbers that I have come from the United States, and that's not because I have this myopic focus on my country, but it's because we actually have really amazing data from something called an internet and American life project coming from Pew Research. And so what this data says is that 20% of Americans don't have access to the internet at all. Now, that's an interesting number, but it's not nearly as interesting to me as the fact that 35% of Americans, more than a third, don't have access to the internet at home. Now, think about all of the things that you might do on your personal computer that you wouldn't want the prying eyes of your boss or your coworkers or strangers at the library to look over your shoulder and watch you do. I don't know what you're thinking about, but I'm thinking about checking your bank statement, maybe looking up a personal medical condition, getting a new job, heck, even shopping for Christmas presents. These are all things that we take for granted we can do from the privacy of our own personal internet device. So this number looks at Americans as a whole, but the numbers are even more stark for populations of people who have been traditionally disadvantaged. 29% of black Americans don't have any internet access and 51%, more than half, don't have a connection at home. The numbers are about the same for Hispanic Americans, about a third with no connectivity and about half without access at home. If you're a low income American, meaning you make less than $30,000 a year, 38% don't have internet access and about 60% don't have a connection at home. And you might imagine, well, it's like if you're struggling to pay the rent, put gas in the car, put food on the table, having an internet connection might seem like a luxury, but 80% of Fortune 500 companies only advertise their job listings online. And Americans who have access to the internet get access to coupons and sales and discounts and services that could save them $8,000 to $10,000 a year. For low income Americans, not having access to the internet puts the tools for escaping poverty increasingly out of reach. And if you don't have a high school education in America, 57% have no internet connection and a whopping 88% don't have a connection at home. Think about it. You don't have an education so that means you don't have a job. So that means you don't have any money and that means you don't have any internet. And that leaves crystal meth. You guys laugh. You know what everybody does have? Everybody has a phone. Everybody has a phone. Numbers of people who have acquired a phone in the last three years haven't gone up that much. Having a phone is not considered to be a luxury item in any society. It is a basic staple of human life. You know what has gone up? What has changed a lot just in the last few years? The population of people who said that they've ever accessed the internet from a mobile device. That number has skyrocketed to 55% of Americans in just the last three years. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why this is happening, right? It's smartphones. But when you look at a chart like this, it's sometimes easy to get lulled into the sense of believing that there is a difference between the mobile phone market and the smartphone market. There may be, at this exact moment in time, the same way for our parents' generation, there was an inflection point where there was a black and white TV market and a color TV market. But within the next few years, the differences between these groups will evaporate. And we will see an entirely new population of people accessing the internet. We see them right now today. I call them the mobile-only user. These are people who say that their primary way of accessing the internet is through their mobile device. Of that, 55% of Americans who say they've ever used a mobile device to access the internet, 31% of them say that that is the way they only or mostly go online. 31% that is tens of millions of people. How many conversations have you had about how to provide a great experience for the people who are browsing with IE? How many conversations have you had about the 2% of people who don't have JavaScript turned on? Have you had the same conversations about how to provide a great experience for the people who will never see your website except through the window of a tiny little mobile device? Predictably, the numbers for people who don't have broadband connections at home are much higher. If you'd only have a high school education, 39% of people say that's the way they only or mostly go online. Low-income Americans, 43% of them report that mobile is the primary way they access the internet. Hispanic Americans, it's 42%. And for black Americans, it's a whopping 51%. More than half of black Americans say that's how they primarily access the web. Mobile was the final frontier in the access revolution. Mobile is what has erased the digital divide. A mobile device is the internet for many people. And what do we tell them the internet is? I'm sorry, your mobile device can't access this content. Broken Google searches, content that's not available, weird hover states covering up the content. We treat these people as though it's okay for them if the internet isn't as good. It's okay for them if they get a watered down internet. It's okay if they get an internet that's fundamentally broken. We treat these people as though they are second-class citizens. And they don't deserve access to the same information, the same research, the same services, the same tool as everybody like us who has access to the real internet. So what are we gonna do? I wanna make sure that everybody doesn't think that I'm telling you to rush out of here right now and just go throw something up on the mobile web. In fact, I would actually want you to do the exact opposite. This stuff is hard. And for us to actually really deliver on the promise of an open web and a truly accessible web, a web that is equal to everyone, it's gonna take some time. And so that's why rather than just throwing something up on the mobile web, I think that you need a content strategy for mobile. And it's totally random how these things happen. It's just like a really weird coincidence. But I just happened to have a book of the same title. It came out last fall from a book apart. You can buy it from abookapart.com today. So I wanna leave you with three things that I think you can do right now to go out and start thinking about a strategy for mobile. First one is that you need to know your workflow. And by that, what I really mean is you need to understand the human side of how people create content for mobile devices. One of the biggest challenges that I see talking to organizations today is I go in and what they have done is they have created mobile as if it is yet another silo in their organization. They have basically told the mobile team to go off and say, yeah, here, here's some money. Go off and build whatever you want. No, don't have it hooked up to the CMS. Don't worry about what the desktop team is doing. Just rush, rush, rush, make something on mobile. And so what they have done is they have baked into their org chart. They have baked into someone's career path, someone's bonus in the organization that now they have two completely separate websites. This is an example from Comcast, they're a cable provider in the US. They built a separate mobile website in which they rewrote all of their content for this page to help somebody understand their bill. When you look at it, it says exactly the same thing. It's just that the mobile website is shorter, it's more succinct, it's better written, it's easier to read. The mobile website is better. But if the mobile website is better, why isn't it just the website? Now they've built into their organization that they have to maintain two completely separate versions of their website every time they wanna make a change, every time they wanna make an update. They gotta do it in two separate places. They fork to their organization and that means they fork to their website. And so now they're stuck updating both every time they wanna do something. See, it's not a strategy if you can't maintain it. It's not a strategy if you haven't thought through. Not just how can I get something up on mobile today, but how am I gonna make sure that it fits into my organization, my editorial processes and my content management system for the long term? The second thing you could do, and I really wish you would do this starting right now, you can write better. Yeah, you can clean up the jargon ridden sloppy pros on your website. One of my favorite pet peeves in mobile is to look at all of these sites that are like, here's four tips for writing mobile website text. Here's how to write for mobile, top 10 tips. Here's how to write content for mobile sites. Illustrated with a picture of a man using his laptop outside. I think this one pretty much sums up my point of view on the whole, how do you write content for mobile websites question? See, there's no such thing as how to write for mobile. There's just good writing. And if your content is well written, if it is well structured, then it will make the leap to mobile. The American Cancer Society, when they were thinking about their mobile strategy, asked themselves many of the same questions that other organizations ask. Should the mobile version of our website be like the fun sized candy bar version of our website, a watered down subset? Should we focus on the needs of the on the go cancer patient? No, the American Cancer Society looked at the data that they had for who was visiting their website on mobile. And they realized something important. The people who were most likely to be using mobile to go on their website matched up really neatly with the populations of people who were less likely to get the preventive care and early screenings that they needed to catch cancer early. And so the American Cancer Society concluded that they had a life saving imperative to get all of their content on mobile. Not a subset, not a watered down version, not some edited little bits of the content, all of it. And you know what? They did. This website is a masterpiece of them finding a way to make all of their content easily readable, browsable, navigable and findable on mobile. And the thing is every single word made it to the mobile website. And when you look at it, I will tell you, I think the mobile website is better. It is more focused, it is easier to browse. And they didn't dumb it down one notch. Frankly, I think it would be insulting to tell somebody, oh, you don't get all the same information about cancer because you have a tiny little screen. They took all of their content. And yes, the articles are long. Yes, they are dense. They are important information. And they are easy to read. And they're easy to read, not because they said, oh, here's how we have to change our content to make it good for mobile. It's not that it was designed and written for mobile. It's just good content. See, good content transcends platform. So if your content is well written, if it is well structured, if it is easy to read and people want it, they will want it on their mobile device. Conversely, if your content is crappy and outdated and hard to read and filled with jargon, then here's your chance to clean it up. And if you think that you can have a productive conversation to help your organization clean up your content by waving a tiny little mobile screen in somebody's face and be like, oh, so tiny, can't fit, must clean it up, do so with my blessing. But just remember, you're not just doing that for the mobile audience. You're doing that to make your content better for everyone. And finally, if we're gonna actually make the leap to getting our content on mobile, we have to put more structure into it. See, blogging platforms and CMS platforms that encouraged people to embed HTML in their big messy blobs of content that prevented us from enforcing true separation of content from form, they're holding us back as we try to make the leap to mobile. We can't try to take blobs of content that have formatting all mixed in and try to get them onto different platforms. If we wanna follow the advice that Brad talked about, that NPR has, their create, launch, publish, everywhere strategy, we need chunks of content, clean, well-structured, presentation-independent chunks of content. If you're looking at a screen on the desktop and asking yourself things like, are we gonna keep all this content? Are we gonna get rid of some of it? Are we gonna have to break some of these long pages down into shorter pages? Are we gonna be able to reuse some of these headings from a long desktop page as a link? Like here in this Amazon example, product features from the manufacturer and product description, I'm sure those work great as headings on a desktop page. But if I come in and I have a question that I wanna get answered about this product, I don't know which section to tap on in order to find that answer. Where does it live? I can't tell. Same thing, the body copy that they've shoved in there as a summary. Can I, if I'm curious as to say, how much does this camera weigh? Nothing, not one word on this screen will give me any advice as to which section I should tap on. They're reusing content from the desktop, but it's just not intended for that purpose. And so you dig into it and you realize, oh my goodness, like our desktop content, it's not actually gonna solve the problem. How are we gonna develop alternate content that might work better on mobile? So I posed all of these questions to an audience recently. A woman in the audience raised her hand and she was like, oh, well, we're just gonna use responsive design. I'm like, responsive design's not gonna fix your content problem. I mean, there's no responsive magic wand that you can wave over your website and have it answer all of these questions about how your content is structured. So you have to be thinking about how you create content now, today, and in the future with an intent that it's gonna have to live on all of these different platforms. And so you can't be thinking, you can't be imagining just one platform as you're writing. You can't create content for anyone's specific context anymore. Instead, you have to have a plan in place for how you're gonna create clean, presentation independent content that can live anywhere. Because as Brad tells us, it's gonna live everywhere. And the reason for that is, like the real fundamental core of why this is happening, none of us get to decide what device somebody uses to access the internet. None of us get to decide what's the right device to access our content. Users get to decide that. Whatever device they have available, whatever device they have in their hand, that's the right device for getting your information. And it's our mission, it's our responsibility to provide a great experience for them. Whatever platform or device or screen size or resolution they wanna use. And so what that means, if history is any clue, that disruptive technologies eventually get good. Sure, transistor radios sucked when they first came out, but 10 years later, nobody wanted to buy a big furniture radio anymore. Sure, everybody laughed at the personal computer when it came out. It didn't compete in any form with the larger mainframes that came before it. You know what? Within a decade, nobody wanted to buy a big mainframe anymore. Same thing is happening here. We laugh at the idea that you might wanna apply for a job or pay your taxes from a mobile device. In a few short years, no one's gonna laugh about that anymore. And you know why? Because we're the people who are gonna make it happen. We're the people who are gonna say, hey, instead of laughing at people who wanna do that on mobile, let's ask ourselves, how can we make a great experience for them? What else do they wanna do on mobile? It's our chance right here to sweep away some of the bad decisions and outdated practices that we've had from the past and to do mobile right, do mobile right from the start this time. I say thank you all for having me here. I especially wanna thank the team from Media Evolution for inviting me to speak here, right here on the Chelsea Manning stage. Thank you very much.