Race for Change

When you look back now on the technological developments of the past, it seems amazing how long they lasted until they were replaced by ‘something completely different’. The printing press, the gramophone record, the telephone all lasted 100 years or more. In computing, mainframes like the IBM S/360 or minis like the HP 3000 or DEC PDP11 had decades to repay their investment. Then PCs ruled pretty much supreme for in excess of 20 years.

But a Pace of Change that once could be measured in decades is now down to just a few years and has every sign of getting even faster.

In 2003 I gave my first speech entitled “2020 Vision”. 2020 is just seven years away now. Seven years back, in 2006, there was no iPhone - Nokia and Blackberry ruled. There was no iPad so PCs and Microsoft still ruled. There was no FaceBook available outside of Harvard and Twitter had just been invented. Streaming of anything was pretty much unknown. ‘Cloud’ as a term would not have been recognised. There were no Indian HQed companies anywhere near the Top Twenty SITS suppliers to the UK market. I could go on…

One thing is for sure. Most of the things and many of the lead companies we will be reporting on in 2020 are unknowns today.

There are both huge threats and huge opportunities ahead because of this.

The threat is mostly to the established companies – both tech suppliers and their users alike. Clients – both enterprises and consumers – will want to move to the latest technology almost as soon as it is available. If you do not have that in your offerings, those customers will desert you. It happened to leaders like HP and Microsoft when tablets came along. It happened to the likes of SAP and Oracle when cloud based enterprise solutions came along from the likes of Salesforce.com and Workday. It certainly happened to Nokia and Blackberry when smarter smartphones came along. But it also happened to enterprise users too. Morrisons was far too slow to adapt to online grocery shopping and is paying the price. Some companies like HMV, Blockbuster, Jessops etc paid the ultimate price in their failure to adapt in the right time scale. At the top of the enterprise chain, banks have to adapt extremely quickly to customers requirements to, for example, do all aspects of their banking on the very latest smartphone model. Same applies to HMGovt to its ‘user base’ that cannot understand why there isn’t an App for self assessment.

The opportunity is, of course, the reverse. New companies without baggage can develop new products both quickly and now at a surprisingly low cost. They can disrupt established markets very quickly. Indeed, one of the reasons why there is so much optimism about the UK developing into a major new global tech force might well be because it now doesn’t have many major established global players with associated baggage! It’s the new upstarts around Tech City and the 30+ other tech hubs in the UK that could well benefit from this accelerating rate of change.

Our view is that this Race for Change will be a major factor across every sector that TechMarketView analyses. It will affect every tech business from the largest to the smallest – and their customers too. Companies have to adjust and bring in operating practices that allow both fast recognisition and implementation of change. This applies at all levels. One CIO told me recently that his CFO was wanting software development costs written off over 10 years. The CIO said that most of the things they were working on would be unlikely to last a year before having to be replaced because of technological change.

Ignoring it really is not an option any more. If you do, some upstart really will ‘eat your lunch’. And, you really don’t have a lot of time to put your house in order. I could say if you don’t recognise that already, then you are probably doomed anyway.

Posted by Richard Holway at '20:27'