As tech, media, and telecom collide, ignorance of any one sector leads to failures like Joost and WiMax
Ignorance — “However vast any person's basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read.” - Italo Calvino
Context & Ripple Effects
Evans's essay lands in a long-running argument about who actually understands the industry: Marc Andreessen had pushed back on non-technologists writing about technology back in 2007, and Anil Dash argued in 2012 that the tech press can't be trusted to teach you the industry either. Evans extends that critique from journalism into company-building itself.
The two case studies are instructive precisely because they failed from opposite directions — Joost from the tech side of a tech-media collision, WiMax from the telecom side — and the piece drew unusually broad same-day pickup, circulating through eight prominent industry commentators including Steven Sinofsky, Ryan McCarthy, and Kevin Werbach within hours of publication.
First-order effects
- Teams and investors working at the tech-media seam now have a post-mortem template for Joost-style failures: ventures that treat content licensing, rights holders, and TV economics as an afterthought rather than the core problem.
- The WiMax example does the same for the telecom side, flagging spectrum economics and carrier relationships as domain knowledge that pure-tech entrants ignore at their own cost.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent broadcasters and carriers gain a durable defensive edge over well-funded tech entrants, because the entrants' own playbooks systematically undervalue the incumbent's regulatory and rights expertise.
- Cross-sector fluency becomes a hiring and diligence criterion: boards backing convergence plays will increasingly probe whether the team has operated inside media or telecom before, not just shipped software.
Third-order effects
- If tech, media, and telecom keep collapsing into one converging market, competitive advantage migrates to operators trained across all three, while single-sector specialists face the absorption risk of being reduced to suppliers of one layer.
- The analytical layer matters too: as failures like these recur, independent cross-sector analysts — the role Evans occupies here — become part of the decision infrastructure for investors and operators, echoing the 'untanglers' function described in the New York Times' 2007 profile.
The trend: As software converges with media and telecom, the binding constraint on new ventures is shifting from technical execution to cross-sector domain knowledge, making sector-blindness a repeatable failure mode rather than bad luck.