Michael De Kare-Silver - e-shock 2020: How the Digital Technology Revolution Is Changing Business and All Our Lives

e-shock 2020

How the Digital Technology
Revolution Is Changing
Business and All Our Lives

Michael de Kare-Silver

Best-selling author, digital technology/e-commerce advisor and team-builder

Michael de Kare-Silver 2011

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First published 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-230-30130-6

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Deborah and Alexander, my inspirations!

There is a truly disruptive but exhilarating revolution taking place. Technology has moved into a new era. Digital is changing the way we communicate, the way we buy things, the way businesses interact, the way we talk. Our expectations of what we can do and how we can do it have been transformed. The I-want-it-now, time-poor, technically-literate developed world now demands the convenience of being able to do things my way. I want the anytime, anyhow, anywhere world. I rely on it. It governs my life

Theres a complete transformation taking place. Technically weve moved at an incredibly rapid pace in the past 30 years. We could say were now in the sixth stage of recent evolution:

Main frame

Mini computers

Desktop

Internet

Mobile

Cloud/Social

The pace of these developments, as observed in a Morgan Stanley report, has accelerated. If mainframes took some 20 years to reach mass commercialization, mobile has taken about 7 and social has taken about 3. Whether you talk Moores Law or more simply the billions of dollars of private equity investment, there is a huge amount of continuing R&D and an absolute wealth of ideas in the pipeline of new products that are all queuing and lining-up to find their own commercial, life-changing, business breakthrough applications.

Where is all this heading? What are we likely to see as this decade unfolds? Can we even begin to imagine our world in 2020? Who could have predicted the current scene? Who would have imagined that traditional business models would be so much under threat? Who could have predicted Facebook or the dominance of Apple and Google? Who could have foreseen that online commerce would have destroyed bricks n mortar book shops, record shops, video hire, changed forever the way we buy travel and insurance, the way we bank, buy clothes and electricals, expanded our ability to search the world for bargains, the ease with which a business in London can find customers in China (and more typically the other way around!). The beginning of the 20th century saw the demise of old cotton mills and the collapse of manufacturing in the West as we gained access to lower wage costs and lower prices in Asia. We look back at some of these historic changes and ask: Why didnt the big companies of the day move with the times? Why did great businesses become dinosaurs? And we wonder which great corporations of now will become the dinosaurs of tomorrow. Will companies like Microsoft for example continue to have such a vice-like grip on computer operating systems? If the trend to mobile internet access and mobile computing continues, then might the leading OS from Blackberry, Apple and Google Android supplant that Seattle monolith?

Just twenty years ago mostly the only computers that were in use were in corporations and even then most people did not have one on their desktop. Now they are everywhere and the way we interact with them has fundamentally changed. Human beings think they are in control. But are we? We have become completely dependent on digital machines and equipment. We rely on them completely. Without them we are lost. If we lose our mobile we are distraught. In one recent survey, the one thing people said that they would be most upset about losing was their mobile. It ranked higher than the credit card, jewelry, the car and even the pet dog or cat! it is my most treasured possession.

And we are all expecting computing use, access and application to continue to develop and improve. We can now access them 24/7 from most anywhere. It used to be a world of point and click, now we touch and its like simply pressing a button. Already many people talk to their computer, and voice command and voice recognition software is improving all the time. How much longer before the computer talks to us? Such technology already exists. The computer (can be programmed) to switch itself on at say 6.30am, give us our wake-up call and offer a cheery Good Morning in whatever tone of voice we have selected. As were getting showered and dressed it can be telling us about our schedule for the day. We can say book taxi and (through a simple pre-program and computer Q&A) confirm location and time. We can voice emails and text messages. We can even send through a repeat shopping order. We can tell our computer to schedule a delivery next time were home, book a restaurant, arrange our travel do anything which can be reduced down to automated digital communications. How soon before this sort of interaction and expectation becomes the norm? In fact have computers already taken control? Here are a few recent headlines: