The spark was lit...
Twenty years ago today, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee authored "Information Management: A proposal" and set the technology world on fire. Charlie Cooper at c/net has an interesting post on this today.
There are so many cliched ways to discuss this, so I just wanted to make a few points.
This has been one of the most fundamentally transformative innovations in human interaction and in technology in the past 100 years. Retail and communications have changed. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs and new industries were created because of his paper and subsequent work. It wasn't always pretty (I remember Gopher and Mosaic), but that is part of the development cycle.
In the services industry the shifts have been staggering. For financial services, the Web took the ATM revolution and put it into high gear. Fewer consumers than ever visit their banks or speak with their brokers in person. Online banking and bill pay (note: I have a client that offers this service) is now the dominant way consumers interact with their financial institutions. This level of functionality would not have been possible with my 300 baud modem and a dial-up connection 20 years ago.
For consulting companies and other services businesses it has changed the way companies interact with customers, cut down on flights, and most importantly, made the process much more collaborative, shortened cycles and reduced costs. Research, which is the essential underpinning of any strategic consulting assignment (or PR campaign), is more readily available and cheaper than ever before.
Architects, Construction design and management companies and coffee shops have all changed the way they work. We now have a coffee shop in Texas CoffeeGroundz Cafe (@coffeegroundz) that is using Twitter to take orders. As a result, business has doubled.
In the information and technology economy, this type of innovation is occurring all the time. Today I am sure there is something under development that has the potential to be just as transformative. The challenge is finding it and having a mind open enough to apply it to our daily lives and our businesses.
What technologies do you think we will be talking about in 20 years?
Posted by Mark McClennan on March 13, 2009 at 12:02 PM
