Editor’s Letter – May/June 2022

When M2 printed its first edition back in 2005, the median New Zealand house price was $240,900, Netflix was a DVD delivery service, Myspace was by far and away the world’s most popular social network and also had more web traffic than Google, and a new book about the 1918 flu pandemic, The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, inspired President George W. Bush to develop a pandemic plan much to the doubt of those around him.

Of course, hindsight is often a futile thing unless you are able to use it to travel back to 2009 and buy a bundle of that crazy new crypto Bitcoin thing. This is especially the case given that so much of our content is about looking forward. Still, it is often good to reflect on the past for clues that will help in the future. As a quick snapshot of the potential lessons from my earliest examples, the Myspace one shows that even if you have the biggest market share, you can still fail if you don’t keep innovating. Check back in another 17 years to see if a name change and a slightly awkward Mark Zuckerburg avatar is enough to keep Facebook, sorry, Meta on top.

Netflix is a good example of this, they not only out Blockbustered Blockbuster with getting movies into people’s homes, but they also took on the studios with original content. Their recent subscriber and share price drop indicates some competition within the sector that they pioneered but of course, if you look back at their history they have faced bigger challenges in the past.
That eyewatering median house price from 17 years ago shows that regardless of what kind of political rhetoric is floating around, try and put what money you can into assets. History and the presidency of Donald Trump, by the way, has actually made George W. Bush seem relatively regal in comparison. Anyway, regardless of what you think of him, we can still learn from him. And if you think something bad might happen, get prepared and don’t listen to doubters.