My first big sale was a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s. Summer of 1985. I had pimples and great hair.

Now there will be no more Britannica because I can click on a $GOOG ad at the end of this post to cure male baldness and nuke my pimply skin.

Back to my short story. I answered an ad in the ‘Newspaper’ of all places. Britannica was a machine. They printed money. They had a great product, a finely tuned funnel and a salesforce that followed a script. A numbers game. I was assigned to this great guy Check Chan. A freaking closer. He taught me everything there was to know about selling that summer and I wish I had paid more attention to the genius details of Britannica the machine. If I was not hooked on the madness of 140 characters, I would write and write and write about this experience, but I have tweets to do.

Britannica has/had…great products, awesome funnels, tight scripts, and all-star people. NOT ENOUGH.

Killed by the platform.

Today there is a ‘better’ tool says Britannica’s President Jorge Cauz. The internet.

It took Wikipedia 11 years to murder a 244 year old institution. WOW!

There is no ‘Occupy Wall Street’ to defend Britannica. There IS an ‘Occupy Wall Street’ getting run over by Wall Street selling shares in Britannica killers.

Things are moving really fast.