Thanks to those of you that managed to catch Nick's talk on why it’s time to kill the PDF! If you didn’t make it, here’s the gist of what you missed...
The UK is pretty great at cycling, right?
Well, it wasn’t always that way. From 1900 to around 2000, we used to be infamously bad at cycling. In 100 years, we only won one gold medal at the Olympics.
It got so bad that manufacturers were embarrassed to have us ride their bikes. So what changed?
His name was Dave Brailsford and he broke down everything that goes into riding a bike, then improved each part by 1% which turned into a significant change when it was all put back together.
The British cycling team started making small changes to every aspect of cycling - from heated shorts to keep the muscles at the right temperature, to rubbing alcohol on the tyres to stop them slipping.
All these small changes built up performance over time and now the UK has had 66 Olympic gold medals and five Tour De France wins in six years.
No matter how good the cyclist, if the bike has issues, cycling will be poor. In this way, the PDF is holding us back on our ability to improve.
With the PDF, production is expensive, slow, and cumbersome, due to its centralised model.
Let’s look at transport in London to prove the importance of marginal changes in production. Who remembers the paper tickets on the tube? You had to queue up at the ticket office and buy your physical ticket for each journey.
Enter the Oyster card in 2003 and suddenly everyone is their own ticket office. And then even greater improvements were made with the introduction of contactless card payments in 2012. No more topping up, no more buying oyster cards.
Everyone who has a bank card is their own ticket office.
When they moved away from a centralised model to a decentralised one, the consumer was empowered and essentially autonomous. This ultimately led to better outcomes (faster, cheaper, more reliable).
When Cisco moved away from the PDF to Turtl, they kept control their content during the design process, were able to produce much more at a faster rate, and saved huge sums of money.
Is the PDF interactive? Responsive? Can it receive live updates? No. Experience is the focus for businesses looking to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Can you honestly say you enjoy the experience of reading a PDF?
Does its lack of interactivity and pitiful mobile-compatibility encourage you to engage with the content you’re reading?
And the PDF absolutely does not do measurement.
In 2019, data is more important than ever. Literally everyone and their dog is sending data: cars, watches, ovens, boilers, lightbulbs, and, yes, actual dogs: There’s a smart dog collar that monitors your dog’s health and welfare, and notifies you if it needs to go to the vet.
That’s right. We have dog collars that record more data than the format we’re sending our content on.
Netflix is a great example of a company that maximises data tracking. They monitor what people are watching, how long for, what they’re sharing etc.
What insights does this give them? Just take a look at their Netflix Original shows. New insights lead to new possibilities which lead to new business models.
Data drives innovation. This just scratches the surface on why it’s time to #KillthePDF.
Can we do to our content what Dave Brailsford did to British cycling? Absolutely. But not on a Penny-farthing. The PDF is not keeping up with the times and is not moving in the direction we need it to go.
Don’t be stuck in the past, let’s leave the PDF behind.