I watched a Thomas Friedman – Discovery Channel – video on India and Outsourcing the other day and now this from Jeff Matthews. I love the way some people can look at the year and the events and give you some different angle and perspective

Thursday, December 29, 2005

The Business Story of the Year.

Parnell: Yo where’s the movie playin’?
Samberg: Upper West Side, dude.
Parnell: Well let’s hit up Yahoo Maps to find the dopest route.
Samberg: I prefer Mapquest—
Parnell: That’s a good one too.
Samberg: Google Maps is the best!
Parnell: True dat!
Both: Double true!
Samberg: 68th and Broadway—
Parnell: Step on it, sucka…
—“Lazy Sunday” video from Saturday Night Live

The business story of 2005—if I may be so presumptuous as to declare it myself (and, since this is my blog, I will)—can, I think, be summed up quite neatly in the following URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=oZOsgQC8qqM&search=SNL%20

That URL takes you to a web site called YouTube (“Broadcast yourself. Watch and share your videos worldwide!”).

YouTube contains almost any kind of video you want to see—from Ashlee Simpson’s lip synch unmasking on Saturday Night Live to OJ Simpson’s car chase and the Beatles’ final gig on a rooftop in London—and many you don’t, particularly the bizarre and highly personal videos posted by individuals you’d rather not have your daughter bring home for dinner, if you catch my drift.

The video you will see at the above URL is a Saturday Night Live-sponsored “digital short,” called “Lazy Sunday,” and it shows two earnest young white Manhattan-ites rapping earnestly about going to see “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

And for those of us who have failed to find anything funny coming out of Saturday Night Live since, oh, Eddie Murphy or Martin Short left, the video is hilarious.

What does a YouBet video have to do with the Business Story of the Year?

Well, it was created, produced, filmed, edited and uploaded digitally, very likely without the use of a single product from Microsoft. Furthermore, it was searched for and downloaded by hundreds of thousands of individuals likewise without the expenditure of a single dollar going to Microsoft.

Finally, and not surprisingly, not one of the products shown or rapped-about in “Lazy Sunday” mentions a Microsoft product.

Which is why, in the category of “Most significant business story of the year 2005,” I nominate the undermining of Microsoft’s monopoly by a band of mostly anonymous individuals who did it with nothing much more than ideas in their head and lines of code in their computers.

Which is, I think, pretty cool.

Jeff Matthews
I Am Not Making This Up