| The answer to "What has changed? Which assumptions do people make that are no longer true? Why does everything feel like it's speeding up?" is supposedly "Technology is transforming virtually every business sector." It list three examples which are mostly true. But the same answer could easily have been said any time in at least the last 120 years -- and it was. I think the complaint about the shallow content in this presentation is completely justified, because there's nothing really new about the idea of change. Steam power. Electricity. Telegraph. Telephone. Mechanical calculators. Slide rules. Cheap aluminum. Flight. Punch card sorting machines. Linotype machines. Each of those are examples where technology transformed business sectors. The telegraph made it possible for information to reach around the world on the same day it happened. Ham radio enthusiasts talked to each other around the world, including bouncing TV signals off the moon. Scratch off the names and it's the same ideas that this presentation promotes as something somehow new. It's assumes the fallacy that what you grew up with was slow and unchanging. It's difficult to read much of the research literature from the 1960s without hearing people talk about the "information explosion" and there being too much change and things out of balance. Mail order is an 1800s example of "barriers to entry melting away" and is how Sears gained its fame. So was the rise of the daily newspaper, subsidized by advertising that made is possible for people to know what was available. "Power has shifted from companies to consumers" ... Hello, the 1930s called. Consumer Reports wants to know if you would like a subscription so they can pay for rigorous testing. Or do you seriously think that mass edited unrestricted feedback can't be gamed? "Individuals and small teams have a massive impact." etc. That sounds a lot like the HP Way, which has as point #1 "We have trust and respect for individuals" Except, oddly enough, the Google way doesn't mention ethics. Compare to the HP Way where "We conduct our business with uncompromising integrity." and that as a good corporate citizen HP will "meet the obligations of good citizenship by making contributions to the community and to the institutions in our society which generate the environment in which we operate. Does Google consider ethics less important than business nirvana? What is new in this presentation that HP didn't cover in the 1960s? |