Every decade or so, technology can shift the world with a boost from culture and society. One such shift is under way, says George Colony, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Forrester Research Inc.
Colony outlined his near-term expectations in a keynote address last week at Connections2012, an Indianapolis user conference sponsored by the email marketing vendor ExactTarget. The three-day event attracted 4,000 attendees. In Colony's view, technological trends alone -- such as the oft-quoted Moore's law about the doubling of processor performance every 18 months -- don't provide an adequate lens for the future. "There are other factors that lag technology," including capital, culture, processes, organizations, and skills. These factors catch up to the enabling technologies every seven to 10 years. When they do, "you get a thunderstorm."
George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, in 2011. (Source: Magnus Hoij)
Colony sees four "thunderstorms" headed our way.
Storm No. 1: Death of the Web
"We believe the Web is a dying technology," Colony said. It may not go away entirely, but it might continue, like AM radio, as a "lowest common denominator." The reason? Network speed improvements lag improvements in processor speeds (which are doubling every 18 months) and storage (which is doubling every 12 months).
As a result, using increasingly powerful mobile devices as file viewers for the cloud "makes no sense." Instead, an architecture that links the cloud to powerful local apps on mobile devices will rule in the future. (Forrester predicts the app market, now worth $4 billion, will be worth $100 billion in the next three or four years.)
If this worldview is correct, Apple's iOS and Google's Android will definitely survive, as well as Amazon, which (like the other two) has its own app marketplace. Colony was slightly less confident about Microsoft, which is only now introducing Windows 8 and "copying everything Apple has done." (In addition, the other three companies -- led by Apple -- have tens of millions of credit card addresses on file.)
The Forrester leader was quite negative about Facebook. He called the social media giant "massively threatened," because it lacks both an app marketplace and mobile devices.
Storm No. 2: Social hits the wall
The second storm is what Colony called POSO, or post social. He believes there's simply no more headroom in social networking. People are spending as much time as they can on social media -- more time than on any other tasks except child care and cooking. Forrester also sees an inevitable pushback against social media -- users consider 55 percent of the time spent there wasted, the firm says.
"Social is running out of time and running out of people," Colony said.
Storm No. 3: New customers
Young people, specifically Generation Z (those 10-22 years old), show very different media consumption habits, preferences, and expectations than even their slightly older brothers and sisters, he said. But brands don't understand the unique requirements of this age group, including their preference for "multichannel" experiences -- those spanning various Websites and applications. Worse, today’s CEOs have little affinity with these youngsters; Colony said the average age of the CEOs at the top 100 global companies is 59.
Storm No. 4: Mobile's impact
Colony's final thunderstorm is the impact of mobile devices, which he predicted will continue to grow in terms of processing power and sensors.
These devices are already producing a deluge of data, and businesses will increasingly feed this data into predictive analytics to fuel what he called "context-rich experiences." In the near future, users won't launch applications; their preferred apps will alert, suggest, and assist them based on explicit preferences and past activities.
To create these sorts of "mobile engagement" systems -- ones that work in complex, real-time scenarios -- core business systems will need to be reimagined. These systems will depend on content to succeed with customers.
I've always gotten the giggles when the putrescent pundits at old-school "think tanks" like Forrester start throwing BS around. We used to get out our cards and play "Buzzword Bingo," because, well, nobody throws buzz-words like people who would like to be paid for their opinion on something that everybody knows about already. If you want to make it sound like you know something that others don't, you usually start making up your own lingo and using it as if everybody knows what you're talking about. Those that get confused by these made-up terms then spend enormous amounts of money for the publications of these pundits, only to discover that it's usually something that they already knew, and that the think-tank's grasp of the obvious is tenuous at best. The sky isn't really falling, the Web isn't coming to an end, and yes, kids consume web content far more readily than their parents. There's that "duh" moment when you realize that the man behind the curtain has just used 1500 words to tell you something that your average high school graduate can cover in ten. This bliffy got one thing right, though: like most older people, he's completely out of touch with the youth market. Perhaps he can hire some young people to tell him what's going on, and *they* can be paid for their opinion on something that everybody already knows. Funny how what goes around comes around -- again.
The first time I encountered a prediction that the Web was dead was in 1997. The Web was barely even born then. I expect the Web will outlive this prediction, just as it has the others.
It pays in these sorts of discussions to distinguish carefully between, on the one hand, the Web -- an application that, like Dropbox and Facebook -- runs on the Internet, and, on the other hand, the Internet itself.
You say: "Take Dropbox and services of the like. I don't think about them being "on the Web." You're right not to think of them that way, because they don't run on the Web. They're Internet applications which can be accessed through the Web and other means. (And like you I rarely use the Web interface -- although when I share documents, I send a URL, which is a Web tool.)
Social media saturation -- I think it will become more common. Work-related social networking will continue to occupy its own niche, but I think people are starting to have their fill of some of the non-work-related social sites.
Agree that the death of the Web is premature. The death of the underlying access technology is more like it -- and that's not an issue everyone will be aware of, no?
Kicheko, the "elastic limit" of social media...Perfect. Why weren't you around when I was writing this post!?
As for Colony's contention about the Death of the Web, I think he's more saying that thanks to Internet-enabled apps, the relationship between local and "cloud" will be increasingly seamless and invisible. Take Dropbox and services of the like. I don't think about them being "on the Web." They synchronize my devices is all. (And, regarding this app, I very rarely visit the Web interface.)
I agree with points 2, 3 and 4 and particularly that social media is really approaching its elastic limit.
Death of the web on the other hand ...we may be predicting it too soon (hoping i did not misunderstand the point). True that mobile will be bigger than web, but i doubt the basic way of working in the office for instance is about to change. We still work best from a big screen and access the web that way, and commonly using search tools.
My take is that mobile is only coming in to fill an unoccupied gap rather than to kick out web per se. In the sense that people will access internet more in times they would have otherwise not gone to the internet at all. However in times when they were bound to log into their laptops and desktops, they still will do.
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