What country has more people on the Internet than the United States has citizens? Ding ding ding! China.
China has over 450 million Internet users and we’re now witnessing Chinese digital culture turn into a precursor of things to come.
If Japanese mobile culture set the future vision for mobile in the ‘00s, Chinese digital culture looks set to become a similar bellwether in global digital culture for the next decade. In simple terms, with so many people participating online, we can look for emerging behaviors that may bubble up in the West as well.
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“Prediction is difficult, especially about the future,” is a quote attributed to people as diverse as the physicist Niels Bohr and baseball legend Yogi Berra.
It is, of course, a mangling of the English language, but resonates because it’s true. Prognostication is a tricky business, usually best left to carnival hucksters and high priced Wall Street analysts.
However, despite the pitfalls, we can make some reasonable assumptions. Some important digital trends have highly foreseeable outcomes. We have a good idea about what limits will be hit, problems that will follow and some concrete notions about how they will be solved. The future exists, it just hasn’t arrived yet.
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Are you adding value? Really? What kind and to whom? Does it matter as long as you’re making money?
In his book, The New Capitalist Manifesto, author Umair Haque argues that it does. It is, as I’ve noted in an earlier post, a flawed book. However, the central point is insightful and salient.
While a generation ago the focus among economists was shareholder value, it’s become clear that’s not enough. Businesses have a variety of stakeholders, including employees, customers and society at large. While it may be expedient to overlook such things in the short-term, companies that do will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
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Pissed off at the system? Most people are, as they should be. Systems suck. Anybody who says he likes the system is either a liar, a fool or the guy who created it in the first place.
The system favors some over others, overlooks important, sometimes crucial information and has so many rules that they end up contradicting each other. What a mess!
All of those things are true, but we run into even bigger trouble when we confuse problems with the particular system we are mad at with ones general to systems themselves. We end up tearing down the old system in favor of a new one which is often just as bad and sometimes worse. We lose time and incur costs along the way.
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Lately, the world has felt out of kilter. Things don’t conform to the rules we’re used to, but spin out of control, seemingly at random.
We’ve witnessed the Arab Spring, where entire cultures turned on a dime, rose up and overthrew regimes that had ruled for generations. Financial crises start with obscure acronyms and reverberate throughout our society. We appear to be in uncharted territory.
But is that really so or are we just becoming aware of realities that until now we’ve been blissfully ignoring? Before the digital age, we were able to sequester our organizations behind legal and organizational barriers, staving off the tides of evolutionary change. That’s becoming less and less tenable. Our challenge now is to face those forces head on.
There is no doubt. We are entering the age of mobile and that represents a vastly different technological experience than anything we’ve ever encountered.
However, in one respect the mobile age will be exactly the same as everything that preceded it: The trend has barely started and already marketer’s mouths are watering. We can’t wait to dive into the “third screen.”
However, a requisite amount of caution is warranted. Mobile computing is a fundamentally different kind of animal. The true value of mobile computing goes far beyond the device itself. It’s embedded in the interactions between devices and objects in the real world. As we shall see, that will make all the difference in the world.
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Hey you! You’re a bright one. You’ve got a real spark, I think you’re ready for some real high-level thinking. You are now a strategist!
That’s right! No more toiling away in the Dickensian world of Word and Excel, you are now strictly in PowerPoint. You have transcended the Samsara of everyday business life and achieved the Nirvana of full strategic consciousness. Great. Now what do you do?
All too often, “strategy” is a value judgement rather than a practice. Nobody is a screw-up anymore, merely “not strategic.” One becomes “strategic” by getting promoted, not necessarily through acquiring new skills. So what should a strategist do? Well, there’s an answer to that. As Wittgenstein would say, it’s time to let the fly out of the bottle.
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While the rest of the economy is sputtering, social commerce is booming. Sites like GroupOn and livingsocial are taking the world by storm.
On the surface, it looks like the early days of the Web, when sites selling everything from groceries to pet food were sprouting up everywhere.
Most failed, but Amazon boomed. It was a “winner take all” game. So it would be logical to assume that social commerce will go the same way. A wide and vibrant field, an all out race and then one man left standing.
However, look beneath the surface and it becomes clear that it will most likely be very different this time. We are much more likely to see a situation similar to online media; a variety of models competing in a fragmented, vibrant market.
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What will the digital world look like in ten years? The trends are already clear.
Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path. The explosion in the volume of information and number of devices will persist. Our data will be linked and most likely be processed in qubits rather than bits.
However, trends tell us very little. It’s discontinuities that drive history. Everything seems fine and then boom! E-commerce comes along, then search engines, social media, smart phones and on and on. Much like the flood that set Noah on his journey, such events, although driven by trends, take us in completely new directions and create new orders.
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