“If you are not on the wave (of technology and the market) then you are below…”
This is how the previous note ended with the “promise” that it continues …
And the history of technology shows this. That it does not stop. And it continues!
Shortly after the start of the second millennium, and after we had “saved” ourselves from the Armageddon of the Y2K bug, that is, the enormous phobia with the programs of old computers, and especially the computers of the 70’s and 80’s that would read 1/1/2000 as 1/1/1900 (!!) and would block everything (!), the trends were to go to the web and that everything would be done from there. That is, there was a school of thought that argued that by 2005, e-commerce would have surpassed real commerce … Billions of investments, which resulted in the .COM bubble, that is, in another bubble …
The period of massive networking and virtualization followed, while the most important new entry technology, at the level of mass use, came with the Apple IPOD to listen to music, watch videos and take photos with a small and easy-to-use pocket device, and a little later with the appearance of the iPhone, which created a completely new category of “smart” communication devices. The tablet that came just before Easter 2010, with the well-known queues outside the Apple flagship store on the corner of 5th Avenue and Central Park, in New York, the emblematic transparent “cube”, completed the puzzle.
Then came the Liehman Brothers crisis in September 2008 and the global economy sank for 3 years and Greece for 10 years.
But technology did not stop, it changed shape a little and a new wave began to take shape in the early 2010s. The Cloud.
The logic of decentralized computing that was created in the 70´s and prevailed in the 80´s, began to lose ground under the logic of new centralized devices (centralized computing) where the computing power and applications are provided by a tenant from a central super server (today cloud devices). Something that as a methodology takes us back to the 50 and 60, when UNIVAC and IBM did not sell the mainframes, but “rented” them… Along with the applications! (Reminds you of something?)
At the same time, new achievements such as the speed of networks, fixed and wireless, bitcoins, blockchain, analytics, robotics, quantum computers, artificial intelligence and intelligence, are here to change, not the market, but society.
And this change is not so simple to follow. If once a business was started with a group of techno freaks, today the depth of knowledge required and global competition make the venture very difficult. Especially if you are in today’s Greece …
So we are called upon to answer what the market will demand in the next 10 years and how we will be called upon to meet this demand.
The most recent studies show that in the next 10 years, the majority of today’s systems integrators will disappear and be replaced by fewer and larger companies, with many different skills within them. On the other hand, there will be small and very specialized units and/or startups that will operate as boutique stores, which when they exceed a certain size will be acquired by a large “store”.
Certainly the environment will not favor the small and medium-sized mass of companies.
On the other hand, the requirements for know-how and the cost of acquisition and maintenance will be so great that it will be impossible for a company without strong resources (knowledge, capital, innovation) and market share to cover it.
In terms of geographical coverage, the nature of technology is global (and soon interplanetary with the “colonization” of planets like Mars at the end of the 2030s), so extroversion will be the key parameter for survival and expansion.
We are leaving strict local borders and addressing the entire planet.
I would dare to mention that in technology, Moore’s Law (Gordon Moore (born 1929), co-founder of Intel, Moore’s Law, 1965) and Darwin’s theory (Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Theory of the Evolution of Species and Natural Selection, 1838) coexist.
Every two years, global computing power doubles (Moore) and at the same time, the one that best adapts to current conditions (Darwin) will survive.