Tech Moves @ Warp Speed

There was a time in the technology industry, not very far back, when companies dominated for long periods, often decades. Like IBM. Or Microsoft.

Then the Internet arrived, with its “power vested in me by nobody in particular” philosophy, as stated by Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape! And the rules of the game changed forever. Neil Gaiman described it as follows:

“The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down…The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are. So make up your own rules.”

As Joshua Topolsky wrote, today, even 6 years feels like an eternity in technology:

 “Only six years ago, the vast majority of people had no idea that a phone could do anything other than make a phone call. The concept of "apps" did not exist at all. The idea of using a phone as a GPS unit or a camera was laughable. Twitter and Facebook were nascent distractions. Netflix actually mailed DVDs to people.”

More people access the Internet today via their phones and tablets, not their PC’s: this is what Steve Jobs famously described as the “post-PC world”. And thus began the decline of Microsoft, a PC era company.

Or take Facebook, the dominant social network…in the PC era. On smartphones, it’s a different story. There are so many apps vying for top dog status: WhatsApp, Viber, Snapchat, Line and of course, Facebook itself. While not dead or dieing, Facebook is still a company struggling to deal with the post-PC world.

And then there’s the ferocity with which the rise of the iPhone followed by all the Android phones wiped out the ruler of the dumbfeature phone era, Nokia.

I loved what Vincent Washington, senior business development manager at BlackBerry, said in an article titled The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History:

“One thing we missed out on was that Justin Bieber wanted to rep BlackBerry. He said, “Give me $200,000 and 20 devices, and I’m your brand ambassador,” basically. And we pitched that to marketing: Here’s a Canadian kid, he grew up here, all the teeny-boppers will love that. They basically threw us out of the room. They said, “This kid is a fad. He’s not going to last.” I said at the meeting: “This kid might outlive RIM.” Everyone laughed.”

Justin Bieber has indeed outlived RIM (later renamed BlackBerry). Even teenage fads outlast tech giants these days!