The Forefront of Technology
During a recent reading session I was taken back down memory lane by an article in Fast Company entitled "The Evolution of Amazon". (One often goes down memory lane once past 50, but hang with me on this one if you can.)
The article speaks for itself regarding the total transformation of the book publishing industry by Amazon and the Kindle. Such massive changes are exciting for most and downright scary for those closest to the established industry. In this case, the metamorphosis of the book publishing industry with its many strange caveats may be good. Like most industry transformations the established few will fight it tooth and nail.
This made me ponder the many such transformations I have been part of in the technology world. My fascination with technology started early with taking old radios and televisions apart. You could see radical changes then based upon models 3-4 years apart. Now the changes come every 6 months.
My first job out of college allowed me to be the trendsetter in a more traditional business. I started my career in business forms. I was pretty good at selling them up and down the street to all sorts of businesses on the southwest side of Indianapolis. Because of that fact the owners offered me the chance to help introduce carbonless paper forms to our area. This was sort of like the fax story I related a few posts back.
If you can imagine, I had customers plead with me to keep their old carbon paper forms that were messy and literally added tons each week to waste in our environment. Thank goodness the new way caught on. More importantly I was hooked on being part of the catalyst for change in any business setting.
My next two examples allowed me to be on the buying rather than the selling side. Not long after our first child was born, my wife decided to call in the Encyclopedia Britannica salesperson. She reasoned that, for us to be a proper household for attainment of knowledge, such a set was needed. We listened patiently to the presentation. Just as the properly trained salesman was going for the close, I mentioned the rudimentary online information service at the university where I was taking MBA classes. I asked why we should buy such a large set of books when I could research any article online there. I even ventured as far as to predict that nearly every middle class home and up may someday have access to such research via this online interface. Neither the sales person nor my wife bought in and we purchased the entire set and the annual updates until the worldwide web became commonplace!
The second one was over lunch with my travel agent in the early 90's. I asked her what she was going to do when all of her customers could easily compare flights and buy them with a few clicks of a button. Her retort was that the airlines would never put her out of business and the paper printed ticket would keep her around. She closed up several years later after downsizing twice.
In both cases technology caused transformation to happen in real time. Numerous people benefited and only a few lost. However, those who were losing made a ton of noise.
I truly believe this will continue to happen in philanthropy. We have already seen the convenience and proliferation of web sites and online giving. That in my opinion is just the tip of the iceberg. Communications and the relationships they nurture are the key fulcrum of philanthropy. It is in this area of communication where the transformation of technology is happening quite rapidly.
Communications are now pervasive for all of us. We have the desire to share and to know what everyone else is doing that we care about, hence the lightening fast growth of social media such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Add in the RSS feeds, emails, texts and other real time communications and you have the makings of a revolution in relationship building for nonprofits.
Just imagine how easy it will be for all of us to be in the real time communication fray when we only need to carry one single device to use. Please click on this link to see Dan Mascai’s opinion on how that will all happen.
Here is a brief snapshot of the essence of the single page article. Online you can point to each device and see how they just might morph into one single device. Perhaps it will be as commonplace as a wristwatch is now!
How our diverse species of consumer electronics -- books, music, computers, and phones -- have evolved. Will a single device ever unite them all?
