Predictions for 2004 and beyond

I've put together two documents that outline my thoughts as to the things we should be thinking about for the coming year; the first is a general list of trends and issues; the second is from an article I wrote for senior executives of associations, on the issues that they must manage on behalf of their members.

• General predictions
• Association article

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  Permanent link to this item ...posted at 08:15 AM...December 23, 2003
  
  

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  Interactive workshops and corporate strategy sessions

  A client asked this week if I only do keynotes at conferences -- to which I responded with a resounding NO. I do quite a few workshops and interactive group discussions focussing on trends, innovation issues, the future, affecting your industry or organization. I've pulled together a summary into this document which outlines how I go about doing this, as well as a few examples of but a few of the interactive workshops I've done to date. Look at it here
  

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  Permanent link to this item ...posted at 05:05 PM...December 17, 2003
  
  

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  Online photo sites -- no redundancy, no backup -- and no business....

  Is this any way to run a business? A major online photo site -- PhotoChannel -- goes down, taking down many of the its photo processor clients with it, including WalMart?

  Walmart? The company that runs the largest and most sophisticated supply chain in the world -- and they can't keep a darned photo site up?

  Where are their backup systems? Where's the redundancy? Where is the plan to minimize business interruption?

  I would imagine that PhotoChannel has absolutely destroyed its credibility with its customer base in this fiasco. And it goes back to a point I've been making for some time as found in my Profit article of some months back -- I'm still of the belief that issues of security; overall infrastructure reliability; and redundancy are issues that need to be dealt with at the level of the Board.

  I'd hazard a guess that the Board of Photochannel was negligent in their duties, and if I were a shareholder, I'd be screaming blue murder. IF I were the CEO of WalMart or Loblaws, I'd be demanding heads, asking how we could build a line of business on such a shoddy technical infrastructure.

  Read below for the full story as reported in the Toronto Star.

  Glitch crashes online digital photo stores - We had a piece of hardware fail'
  Toronto Star, December 16/03

  Digital camera enthusiasts who tried to order photo developing online last week were told for several days to "come back later" after a hardware glitch crashed the network that processes most of Canada's digital photos.

  The online digital photo stores for Black's, Wal-Mart Canada, London Drugs, Japan Camera and Loblaws (Photolab.ca) were all out of service as of late Wednesday and only began to go back online yesterday afternoon.

  "We had a piece of hardware fail," said Kyle Hall, executive vice-president of business development for Vancouver-based PhotoChannel Networks Inc., the company that provides the online print-ordering system for Canada's big-name photo finishers.

  Hall said the company's storage-area network, which is managed by StorageTek Corp. of Louisville, Colo., began having trouble last week receiving and directing order data.

  Attempts to make a quick fix on Wednesday night did not work, forcing the company to do major upgrades on the network.

  PhotoChannel's clients handle 70 per cent of all photos processed in Canada.

  All of their sites were taken offline during the upgrade.

  With Christmas just around the corner, the five-day outage couldn't have happened at a worse time.

  Digital cameras were one of the hottest-selling gadgets this year, and an increasing number of consumers are choosing to go online this season to purchase photo-emblazoned calendars, mugs, mouse pads and t-shirts as holiday gifts.

  "I'm ticked," said Jim Carroll, an author and technology expert who has been trying to order a custom apron for his mother-in-law, a calendar and other photo-gifts for friends and family since late November.

  Carroll said he placed his order through Wal-Mart, and found out last week the order was lost. He tried to place the order again and discovered the Wal-Mart site was down. After checking the sites of some of Wal-Mart's competitors, he realized everybody was down.

  "This just blows me away — and it's so close to Christmas," said Carroll, questioning why so much of the online photo infrastructure in Canada has been centralized with one company. "Where's the redundancy? I wonder how many people out there are just as ticked."

  He now worries his gifts won't arrive before Dec. 25.

  Hall said the timing was unfortunate, but added that the most important part of the season is after Christmas when people are testing out the new digital cameras they got as gifts.

  "From what we've seen from the past year and what retailers expect, order loads right now are light (compared with) what we'll see after the holidays."

  Calls yesterday to Wal-Mart and Black's were not returned. Geoffrey Wilson, a spokesperson for Loblaws, called the situation unfortunate but emphasized that no Photolab.ca customer data had been lost.

  "We've been assured this won't happen again," said Wilson, adding that customers who were inconvenienced by the outage will be getting a 25 per cent discount on snapshot-size photo development through the site.

  InfoTrends Research Group, of Norwell, Mass., estimates the worldwide sales next year of consumer digital cameras will hit 53 million, exceeding for the first time the sales of film-based cameras.

  Sales are expected to reach 82 million units by 2008.
  Additional articles by Tyler Hamilton
  

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  Permanent link to this item ...posted at 06:11 AM...December 16, 2003
  
  

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  "Only a stupid country could do this"

  Canada's Copyright Board ruled today that there should be an additional *TAX* of up to $25 if you buy an Mp3 player in this country, with the money going to artists to make up for online swapping. They also leave intact the existing *TAX* on buying blank CD-Rs.

  Almost two years ago, I wrote the article "Only a stupid country could do this". The full article can be found below; it seems to be an appropriate time to repost it.

  Given such idiocy -- and the presumption that if you buy an Mp3 player you are guilty of downloading music -- there are likely many people who will never be buying another CD again. Indeed, they'll actually join and use a swapping network -- after all, they'll be paying through the nose for music every time they buy a CD-R for business reasons, so why should they pay anymore. Heck, people will probably sign up with allofmp3.com and go on a downloading frenzy.

  This type of idiocy will do nothing to slow the online downloding binge; indeed, it will simply add to it.

  Read on.

  The original article can be found here

  Only a stupid country could do this...
  By JIM CARROLL
  Canoe, March 19, 2002

  We snuck in under the cover of darkness.

  I was trying out my new night vision goggles, the better to spot the border team. In my backpack, I had carefully packed a variety of Maxtor and Western Digital hard drives, a few Sony memory sticks, and several of the new Creative MP3 players to boot.

  Altogether, I figure I was packing at least a couple of terabytes and a half.
  
  Scott, to my left, had one of those new packs that featured external mesh rigging, and so he had crammed in a few extras, such as the new 1024Kb DRAM chips. Over on my right, Eddie, ever the joker, had hung a bunch of Sony memory sticks with string on the outside of his own pack, making him look like a misbegotten Christmas tree, the sticks swinging back and forth with each step.

  All in all, we must have had a few dozen terabytes with us. Enough to get us busted big time, if we got caught.

  We all took a deep breath and continued on.

  It wasn't always this way. One day, you could actually buy the gear of the information age in Canada.

  We stopped to scan the border, and I spotted a guard over on the far right. It looked like he had one of those new storage-sensors, able to sniff out the heat-signature of computer equipment from among the brush. It had a range of 200m, and since we were at least 500m away, we were safe. We trudged on, silent now, not wanting to raise an alarm.

  At some locations, it was easy to beat the border. There were areas staffed by the Mounties who years before, had the critical job of sniffing out and destroying illegal satellite dishes. The better to ensure Canadian Cultural Purity, we were told by our Leaders. Canadian-content and all that.

  Never mind that other countries had other priorities in the early part of the century. They had invested heavily in border resources that could stop any terrorist who even dared to breath their nation's air. Not so in Canada, we knew.

  Our Government and Leaders didn't worry about terrorists -- it worried that people might get their hands on too many megabytes. They passed a law that provided for tax on every type of memory storage sold in Canada, with the funds from the tax going to musicians who were adversely impacted by the emergence of technology.

  Naturally, when The Tax came into effect, people rebelled. People gave up on buying their storage needs from Canadian companies, and started to import them instead.

  Lots of jobs were lost in those early days, particularly as a new hi- tech brain drain began, but our Leaders seemed not to worry. They had imposed The Tax, and all would be well. After all, they thought, our musicians would be happy.

  Happy musicians would make happy music, and so the populace would be happy, and life would be happy. Happy people meant a happy economy.

  At first, it was just a haphazard operation. A business trip to New York, a few hard drives in the briefcase, an upgrade in the laptop. "Anything to declare?" they'd ask at the border. "Our government is an idiot?" you'd gamely suggest, before remembering that the Customs guys didn't have a sense of humor.

  Over time, smuggling operations began to pay off. Heck, the cost of a typical MP3 player went from $100 to $1,200 with the tax, but with smuggled memory you could keep the cost to about $150 or so. A Dell computer that cost $999 zoomed to $1,800 with The Tax, but smart people would buy it for $799 without the hard drive.

  It was no surprise that a big online swapping site began to flourish. It wasn't driven by the demand for storage for MP3 players though. The fact was, it quickly became evident that there were tens of thousands of Canadians - no, hundreds of thousands - who couldn't upgrade to the latest software versions, because they couldn't afford the storage required.

  A vicious spiral began. The Tax was increased again and ever again, because the musicians weren't happy and the people weren't happy -- until it made the cost of computing in the country far out of reach.

  Then came the dreaded Purity Act, the one that demanded that at least 10% of storage space be devoted to Canadian content. Some jokers filled up a section of their hard drive with Anne Murray's "Snowbird," dozens of copies, thinking that might satisfy the bureaucrats. They were busted big time when the Culture Police hacked into their systems and performed the legislated Content-Scan.

  Honest Canadian's didn't give up in the face of such adversity, at first. The swapping site evolved, in short order, into a community. There was talk of the need to fight back, to organize petitions, to elect politicians- with-brains who might cancel the Tax. That all seemed to be brave talk, the type of false bravado inspired by beers over a campfire.

  And then came the night we lost Andrew.

  He was packing a whole bunch of compact flash cards - too many, I told him. But he was driven - not by the money, he said, but by the principal. "Darnit, Randall, they keep telling us that we've got to become a knowledge economy, and they keep putting ridiculous taxes on our tools. I'm not going to take any more from those idiots," he said as he headed off to the gate at LaGuardia.

  The last we heard, they took him out with an UZI at Pearson. Riddled with 37 bullets, went the story, all in the back. He approached the customs line, and when they realized he was carrying a lot of gigabytes, they began to push him around. We heard that he bolted through the line, and ran through the door, screaming "let our storage go...." Ever a sense of humour, even as he bled to death on the sidewalk by Arrivals.

  At that point, it became The Movement. There were many who were convinced that Canadians had to fight back, and maybe the only way to do it was to begin a massive smuggling operation. Flood the border with all matter of storage. Some might get caught, and head to the Pen for violating Canada's anti-storage statute, but many others might get through. Maybe with a concerted effort we could get Canada back on track.

  Of course, the absurdity of the situation was not lost on those who quickly signed up. On the one hand, the politicians-in-charge were all too eager to tell the business world that they had better invest, become more productive, and get involved in the technology-economy-of-the-21st century. Why, there was that famous Deputy fellow, the one who caused such a stir one day and crashed the Canadian dollar when he was a little too blunt in his advice that Canada had to move forward in the information age.

  And then the next day, the same government announced the Draconian anti-memory Tax.

  The Tax.

  Corruption begins on a small scale, said some in the Movement in those early days. There was Argentina, they pointed out, sunk by a morass of unethical politicians, all to eager to share at the teat of the funds sent their way by special interest groups. Greedy little buggers, they couldn't give up even when they knew it was wrong, and eventually brought their country down with them.

  That's what went wrong with Canada, said these radicals of the Movement. These politicians, they argued, had become so corrupt with the lobbying from the music industry, broadcast groups, TV producers and other special interests, that they were willing to do the most stupid things possible.

  Such as impose a tax on the very tools of the technology-economy.

  I thought about this as I approached the border.

  I looked around and trudged on, silent, wary, careful.

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  Permanent link to this item ...posted at 08:11 AM...December 12, 2003
  
  

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  One of the all-time-great inventions.....

  ".... was of course the wheel and it was so beneficial that people have been reinventing it ever since."

  Picked up by my newsclipping service today. What a wonderful statement!

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  Permanent link to this item ...posted at 03:19 PM...December 09, 2003
  
  

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  Thought of the day

  "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups"

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  Permanent link to this item ...posted at 03:17 PM...December 03, 2003
  
  

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  Keeping up!

  Someone admitted to me in e-mail today that they " have finally begun to feel like ......I might not be able to keep up!" This, in an online discussion of an emerging trend that will have significant implications in the future.

  As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about trends and the future, I'm often asked how I keep up. One method is through the sophisticated trend tracking I do - I pull in vast amounts of information from newsclipping services and other sources, and analyze what I see. In order to manage the flood, I've recently settled on using Traction, a sophsiticated tool that has allowed me to build an internal knowledge database of the issues and trends I track.
  

  Traction runs on a Linux server in my home office.

  And essentially, I feed Traction with all kinds of news articles and observations on a regular basis. Each day, I get a view of the information I've grabbed, so I can quickly refresh my observations:

  

  I can go back at any point in time and review information by category -- innovation, corporate culture, emerging trends, ethics -- in order to pull together what's needed for my presentations, articles or material for interviews.

  

  I can add markup to specific articles to highlight key points -- in order to easily find it in the future -- and in an instant, pull up summaries of all these key points. Plus, I can do a full-text search of all articles in order to find that nugget that I remember I saw. Here's an example of a highlight within an article:

  

  I've been working with Traction for just a few weeks, but the more I use it, the more I discover it to be an extremely powerful knowledge tool.
  

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  Permanent link to this item ...posted at 08:38 AM...
  
  

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  Dealing with people who have a "change anti-virus"

  My latest Association Agenda article is online: "Many people seem to be driven by a rather simple outlook on life: whenever confronted with something new, they quickly respond that we can't change things because "we've always done it that way." Read it here. This directly relates to the workshops and keynotes I've been providing on change and innovation.

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  Permanent link to this item ...posted at 07:18 AM...December 02, 2003
  
  

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  How to think about innovation

  My newsclipping picked up a great quote by Home Depot's CEO: "The landscape is strewn with retailers who had a great business model and got locked into the past versus building off the past"

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  Permanent link to this item ...posted at 06:08 PM...December 01, 2003
  
  

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