In The Web and the New Reality, which I posted on December 1, 1995 (and again a few days ago), I called that date “Reality 1.995.12,” and made twelve predictions. In this post I’ll visit how those have played out over the quarter century since then.
1. As more customers come into direct contact with suppliers, markets for suppliers will change from target populations to conversations.
Well, both. While there are many more direct conversations between demand and supply than there were in the pre-Internet world, we are more targeted than ever, now personally and not just as populations. This has turned into a gigantic problem that many of us have been talking about for a decade or more, to sadly insufficient effect.
2. Travel, ticket, advertising and PR agencies will all find new ways to add value, or they will be subtracted from market relationships that no longer require them.
I don’t recall why I grouped those four things, so let’s break them apart:
- Little travel agencies went to hell. Giant Net-based ones thrived. See here.
- Tickets are now almost all digital. I don’t know what a modern ticket agency does, if if any exist.
- Advertising agencies went digital and became malignant. I’ve written about that a lot, here. All of those writings could be compressed to a pull quote from Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff: “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.”
- PR agencies, far as I know (and I haven’t looked very far) are about the same.
3. Within companies, marketing communications will change from peripheral activities to core competencies.New media will flourish on the Web, and old media will learn to live with the Web and take advantage of it.
If we count the ascendance of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) as a success, this was a bulls-eye. However, most CMOs are all about “digital,” by which they generally mean direct response marketing. And if you didn’t skip to this item you know what I think about that.
4. Retail space will complement cyber space. Customer and technical service will change dramatically, as 800 numbers yield to URLs and hard copy documents yield to soft copy versions of the same thing… but in browsable, searchable forms.
Yep. All that happened.
5. Shipping services of all kinds will bloom. So will fulfillment services. So will ticket and entertainment sales services.
That too.
The web’s search engines will become the new yellow pages for the whole world. Your fingers will still do the walking, but they won’t get stained with ink. Same goes for the white pages. Also the blue ones.
And that.
6. The scope of the first person plural will enlarge to include the whole world. “We” may mean everybody on the globe, or any coherent group that inhabits it, regardless of location. Each of us will swing from group to group like monkeys through trees.
Oh yeah.
7. National borders will change from barricades and toll booths into speed bumps and welcome mats.
Mixed success. When I wrote this, nearly all Internet access was through telcos, so getting online away from home still required a local phone number. That’s pretty much gone. But the Internet itself is being broken into pieces. See here
8. The game will be over for what teacher John Taylor Gatto labels “the narcotic we call television.” Also for the industrial relic of compulsory education. Both will be as dead as the mainframe business. In other words: still trucking, but not as the anchoring norms they used to be.
That hasn’t happened; but self-education, home-schooling and online study of all kinds are thriving.
9. Big Business will become as anachronistic as Big Government, because institutional mass will lose leverage without losing inertia.
Well, this happened. So, no.
10. Domination will fail where partnering succeeds, simply because partners with positive sums will combine to outproduce winners and losers with zero sums.
Here’s what I meant by that.
I think more has happened than hasn’t. But, visiting the particulars requires a whole ‘nuther post.
11. Right will make might.
Nope. And this one might never happen. Hey, in 25 years one tends to become wiser.
12. And might will be mighty different.
That’s true, and in some ways that depresses me.
So, on the whole, not bad.
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