Making the future illegal.
The war on change.
I've been involved in the tech industry from a young age I coded my first HTML page at the age of 15 (I’m 30 now), I watched the tech industry consume my first employer and then at a safe distance I watched it consume their competitors too. My first hand experience was as a sales assistance with the long dead MVC (Music and Video Club) who went into administration back in 2006.
I specifically remember talking with colleagues about Napster and the effect that MP3s were having on CD sales when I worked there in 2004. I put forward an idea that people should be able to come into the store and load an album onto a portable mp3 player rather than buying CDs otherwise we were going to lose out at some point (I had insider knowledge as I was one of those downloading music at an alarming rate). Ultimately, we did lose. Napster and various other P2P services (Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey) killed the mainstream CD retail industry.
The music (and most of the entertainment) industry continues to chase its own tail in the shadow of piracy, pumping millions every year into litigation and lobbying rather than trying to keep up with ever changing landscape.
Netflix is a great business that scales with the demand for movies and provides the movie industry a source of income from millions of happy customers. The logic is simple really, would you rather get nothing or have millions of customers paying less than the cost of one DVD to watch your movies. It really is that simple, make it easy for millions of people to watch your movies at a fair price and they will.
I want convenience, a fair price and I want great customer service. That’s it. Don’t be surprised that I don’t want to get in my car and travel to a store to pay for a piece of plastic at double the cost of a months worth of movies from Netflix.
If you can offer me these three things, I’m a customer. That is the standard now, anything less can make you irrelevant in the blink of an eye.
The music industry isn't the only industry facing change at laser speed.
Transport is facing a new era in the delivery of goods and people.
Uber
Simple, I register easily, I tell the app where I need to go and it gives me a clear price and then a smart looking dude turns up in a black car to take me to my destination. Money is taken directly from my card and I can give £10 vouchers away and get £10 travel in return.
Zipcar
Register, walk up to a car open it using your ZipCard use it and pay automatically. This is the future. Its fun, easy and cheaper than owning your own car. No tax, petrol or breakdown stuff to worry about.
These are just two companies of a ton of new start ups who are changing the way we travel. However they are having a profound effect on the big players, auto industry is worried, tax drivers are angry and governments are legislating to keep these dinosaurs happy rather than anyone assuming its time to play catchup.
The book retail industry has gone through the same struggle, with Google and Amazon attempting to digitalise books written throughout history and massive businesses offering dirt cheap books with free delivery. Once again the French government stepped in to prevent further innovation and protect independent book stores by preventing free delivery via Amazon.
These industries need to find some common ground with modern technology, or carve out their own niche before they find themselves relegated to history books (which would presumably be available on kindle only).
There IS a market out there for independent record stores, bookshops and other outlets it’s about identifying what makes you special above the big guys, playing to your strengths and not discounting their effect on what you do.
However, innovation is a fast moving uncontrollable force that topples governments, crushes businesses whatever their size and can kill. It has great applications and truly abhorrent applications, fighting it is ultimately futile.
