I have a core belief about technology which Rands summed up nicely on twitter:
“The correct tool is exponentially more productive.”
Whether you are talking about Netflix upending the rental business, cell phones killing the pay-phone business, new ways to detect flu outbreaks, digitization of film, or more efficient ways to build web applications, the new isn’t just better. It’s radically better.
The radically better, or “exponentially” as Rands put it is really the important bit. We are not talking about small efficiencies that bring about incremental 20-30% gains, these are the big changes that happen over night and catch many people entirely off guard.
Take YouTube for example. There was more original content uploaded in the last 2 months to YouTube than ABC, CBS, and NBC created in the last 50 years… combined! Read that last sentence again, because even I was shocked the first time I ran across the statistic. That’s a lot of video, and makes these mammoth broadcasting networks look like peanuts. Say what you will about the quality of the content getting to YouTube, but YouTube didn’t exist 4 years ago, and with that kind of volume it isn’t hard to outpace the legacy broadcast networks with just a modicum of tweaking.
The same is happening in many other industries: Phone book companies have become irrelevant due to Google. The Apple’s iTunes Music Store is now the #1 music retailer making compact discs obsolete. Amazon is rapidly making many brick-and-mortar stores irrelevant (especially with their for foray into same-day-shipping). And with the Amazon’s Kindle and B&N’s Nook eBook readers coming of age, one doesn’t need a sharp imagination to see what is going to happen to the book industry. The thing about eBooks, is that for the last half-millennia, books have been largely unchanged. Until our generation.
I know people have a hard time wrapping their head around small changes, much less big ones, but these big changes are happening everywhere. Every. Single. Day. We need to adapt, or become as irrelevant as the pay phone has become.
My takeaway? What separates you and your business from your competition is your ability to rapidly change and adapt to these new realities. And then radically do it again in 18 months. And then again, and again, and again.
Tags: change
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