The instant-analysis business is a tricky one. None of us have working crystal balls; any attempt to predict the future, even the five-minutes-from-now future, is risky. For example, on Jan. 31, mere hours before Microsoft made its unsolicited $44 billion-plus offer for Yahoo, Forrester Research, my alma matter, posted a research note with the following headline and deck:
Microsoft Will Make Small Acquisitions
Its Size, Visibility To Antitrust Bodies And Strategy Rule Out Big Deals

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Last Sunday’s Grammy Awards ceremonies were even less relevant than usual, no small achievement. The TV broadcast began with a “performance” by that cutting-edge new artist Frank Sinatra and fell down from there. The only real emotional charge of an evening celebrating the most emotional of media came when we viewers were confronted with the disparity between the preternatural confidence of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” and the shaky, shell-shocked manner in which Winehouse accepted her award for it. Alpha geeks had a moment to celebrate, too, when one of the winners behind Historical Album of the Year (Woody Guthrie’s “Live Wire”) turned out to be a mathematician. But, those and few other brief moments notwithstanding, the action in the music industry is elsewhere.

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The Industry Standard ably chronicled–and, eventually, mirrored–the Internet boom that began a decade ago and died a few years later. (Disclosure: Despite its occasional excesses, I am honored to have been associated with the magazine.) After years of noticing that thestandard.com was still receiving ample traffic and–with one brief exception a few years back–not doing much about it, IDG, which was the Standard’s lead investor and picked up the carcass in bankruptcy court, has relaunched the site this week.

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The Qtrax debacle is getting most of the attention this week, with Warner Music’s ridiculous CEO compensation close behind, but there is promising news in the music industry worth noting. Late last year, there was much fuss around Radiohead’s decision to eschew usual distribution schemes and release “In Rainbows” in a variety of formats, among them free downloads. It was no surprise that the marketing plan worked well and, more recently, helped the on-CD version of the new album top many sales charts. Radiohead is an extremely popular band; of course its experiment did well. But if there’s going to be a music industry anymore, it’s going to be because nonplatinum performers can make a living as musicians.

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The way people are dismissing the One Laptop Per Child project this week reminds me of how people were treating Hillary Clinton during the five days between her Iowa defeat and her New Hampshire comeback. To many observers, the inevitable has become the disaster in record time.

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Recently I produced a CD. It was independently recorded and distributed–and it was available for free on every peer-to-peer service on the planet weeks before it was officially released, so it was only a modest commercial success.

Don’t feel bad. It was entirely expected. Even if there was such a thing as a record industry anymore, no one would expect a double-disc tribute to a 27-year-old album by The Clash to keep Avril or Pink from the top of the charts. But there’s one reaction the record has received that has helped me understand something about the broader media business: the danger of looking backward.

Back when I started the project in 2003, I was delusional enough to think I could get someone else to fund it. I spoke to executives at large multinational record companies and small independent companies, and they all told me, with varying degrees of politeness, to get lost. A few told me it was a crazy idea, a few more told me it was a bad idea and some told me, with that level of snideness only record-company executives can manage, that I’d never finish the project.

But when the record came out, I heard from several record-company executives. Some of them just wanted free copies, some wanted to offer me mild kudos and almost all of them–including one who had rejected the record back in 2003 but forgotten–asked me some version of “Why didn’t you come to us so we could have put this out?”

Aside from reminding me that some people in the record industry view memory loss as a core competency, this reversal in my fortune now that I could no longer do anything about it gave me a clue to where the media industry is right now. Around the same time the record came out, the founder of a dot-com magazine that crashed and burned reminisced with me about an email newsletter I started while the ashes of that magazine were still warm. The newsletter failed, too, in large part because in 2002 online advertising had fallen off a cliff and hit the bottom of the canyon a la Wile E. Coyote. “If you started that now,” he said, “It would be a big success.”

Perhaps. But I don’t have to start it now. The media and technology businesses are now different than they were in 2002 and 2003. When I started the online newsletter in 2002, no one else was dumb enough to try that. Now it seems as if everyone has at least a semipro blog. When I started soliciting performers for the record in 2003, no one else was stupid enough to try and assemble 36 performers to redo–for free!–a long-forgotten record. Now tribute albums are all the rage. Is it just that I have uncannily bad commercial timing?

It is true that I would have an easier time funding something now than four to five years ago. Everyone else is. Indeed, as uncov and others report so gleefully, moronic ideas are getting funded again, while five years ago even a recipe for eternal life might have had trouble scoring a meeting on Sand Hill Road.

But the response I received should make entrepreneurs–and the people who fund them–wary. In both the case of the record and the email newsletter, I was told by experts that something I did at a different time would be successful now. Wrong! If I merely updated or replicated an old idea, it would still be an old idea. But today’s business environment is all about innovation. At its best, it’s about the next thing, not a redo of the last thing. The start-ups most likely to fail are the retreads, the wannabes, the copycats, the ones that mistake features for full-fledged services.

Look at the record industry if you want to see what happens to an industry that reflexively looks backward for ideas. Know your history but don’t be limited by it. At their best, media and technology are about the new. If you had an old idea that people like, say thank you. But, if you want success, keep that old idea where it is and come up with something fresh.