The other day Taxis in London where on strike because Uber was setting up shop in London. Do you know a lot of people that still send paper letters? Book holiday flights via a travel agent? Buy books in book stores? Rent DVD movies?
5 smart programmers can bring down a whole multi-billion industry and change people’s habits. It has long been known that any company that changes people habits becomes a multi-billion company. Cereals for breakfast, brown coloured sweet water, throw-away shaving equipment, online bookstore, online search & ads, etc. You probably figured out the name of the brand already.
Software Defined Everything is Accelerating
The Cloud, crowd funding, open source, open hardware, 3D printing, Big Data, machine learning, Internet of Things, mobile, wearables, nanotechnology, social networks, etc. all seem individual technology innovations. However things are changing.
Your Fitbit will send your vital signs via your mobile to the cloud where deep belief networks analyse it and find out that you are stressed. Your smart hub detects you are approaching your garage and your Arduino controller linked to your IP camera encased in a 3D printing housing detects that you brought a visitor. A LinkedIn and Facebook image scan finds that your visitor is your boss’s boss. Your Fitbit and Google Calendar have given away over the last months that whenever you have a meeting with your boss’s boss, you get stressed. Your boss’s boss music preferences are guesses based on public information available on social networks. Your smart watch gets a push notification with the personal profile data that could be gathered from your boss’s boss: he has two boys and a girl, got recently divorced, the girl recently won a chess award, a facebook tagged picture shows your boss in a golf tournament three weeks ago, an Amazon book review indicates that he likes Shakespeare but only the early work, etc. All of a sudden your house shows pictures of that one time you plaid golf. Music plays according to what 96.5% of Shakespeare lovers like from a crowd-funded bluetooth in-house speaker system…
It might be a bit farfetched but what used to be disjoint technologies and innovations are fast coming together. Those companies that can both understand the latest cutting-edge innovations and be able to apply them to improve their customer’s life or solve business problems will have a big competitive edge.
Software is fast defining more and more industries. Media, logistics, telecom, banking, retail, industrial, even agriculture will see major changes due to software (and hardware) innovations.
What should you do? If you are technology savvy?
You should look for customers that want faster horses and draw a picture of a car. Make a slide deck. Get feedback and adjust. Build a prototype. Get feedback and adjust. Create a minimum valuable product. Get feedback and adjust… Change the world.
If you have a business problem and money but are not technology savvy?
Organise a competition in which you ask people to solve your problem and give prices to the best solution. You will be amazed by what can come out of these.
If you work in a traditional industry and think software is not going to redefine what you do?
Call your investment manager and ask them if you have enough money in the bank to retire in case you would get fired next year and wouldn’t be able to find a job any more. If the answer is no! Then start reading the top of the blog post again…
| Reference: | Software Defined Everything from our JCG partner Maarten Ectors at the Telruptive blog. |
