I interviewed Bob Stein, co-founder of the Voyager Company, about the multimedia era and the legacy of the CD-ROM. We get deep into the evolution of digital non-linear information, multimedia as transitional content, and building a new medium from with a wide range of ideas.
This was a really interesting and insightful talk, and I hope you read!
Bob Stein on the Voyager Company, transitional multimedia, and the long outlook on information
Did you sense there was, at any point, market resistance toward that type of content, or was it just those sort of circumstantial elements that made it difficult to sell?
Interesting question. You know, CD-ROMs… they had their strengths, and they had their weaknesses. I would probably venture to say that they were never going to become… they were never going to be a home run in the sense of the way the book was a home run. It lasted for hundreds of years. That was never gonna be the case with CD-ROMs. We were practicing as much as anything else. We were trying to experiment with, you know, “Let’s take this puppy out on the road and see what she can do!” And in the main, we could sell enough copies to pay for our experiments.
It always has seemed like sort of a transitional medium like that.
We weren’t… yeah. And it’s interesting: so here we are, twenty years later, and we still can’t really do on the Internet what we could do on the CD-ROM. I mean, you can, but nobody does, because it’s too hard still. But we’ll get there, and it’s gonna be much better when it’s on the Internet than it ever was on a CD-ROM, I think mostly because it’s gonna be connected. It’s gonna be part of a web of knowledge and information and exploration, and it’s all gonna be in a social context.
