Category: web of no web | 無處不在的技術 | 보급 기술 | 普及したテクノロジー
The web of no web came out of a course that I taught at the La Salle School of Business at the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona on interactive media to a bunch of Spanish executive MBA students. The university wanted an expert from industry and they happened to find me by happenstance. I remember contact was made via LinkedIn.
I spent a couple of weeks putting together a course. But I didn’t find material that covered many of things that I thought were important and happening around us. They had been percolating around the back of my mind at the time as I saw connections between a number of technologies that were fostering a new direction. Terms like web 2.0 and where 2.0 covered contributing factors, but were too silo-ed
So far people’s online experience had been mediated through a web browser or an email client. But that was changing, VR wasn’t successful at the time but it was interesting. More importantly the real world and the online world were coming together. We had:
Mobile connectivity and wi-fi
QRcodes
SMS to Twitter publishing at the time
You could phone up Google to do searches (in the US)
Digital integration in geocaching as a hobby
The Nintendo Wii controller allowed us to interact with media in new ways
Shazam would listen to music and tell you what song it was
Where 2.0: Flickr maps, Nokia maps, Yahoo!’s Fireeagle and Dopplr – integrated location with online
Smartphones seemed to have moved beyond business users
Charlene Li described the future of social networks as ‘being like air’, being all around us. So I wrapped up all in an idea called web of no web. I was heavily influenced by Bruce Lee’s description of jeet kune do – ‘using way as no way’ and ‘having no limitation as limitation’. That’s where the terminology that I used came from. This seemed to chime with the ideas that I was seeing and tried to capture.
The heat from radioactive processes within the planet’s interior causes the plates to move, sometimes toward and sometimes away from each other. This movement is called plate motion, or tectonic shift
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declaration of a zeitenwende or epochal tectonic shift following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Part of this tectonic shift is Germany’s desire to become a security guarantor in Europe. A lot of coverage has focused on how far away Germany is from this aspiration in terms of military preparedness and over-reliance on the very countries likely to threaten European security.
In an opinion piece Chancellor Scholz asked a rhetorical question
How can we, as Europeans and as the European Union, remain independent actors in an increasingly multipolar world?
Scholz implies that the tectonic shift also adversely affects the United States efforts to jumpstart green industries and contain a globally more aggressive China. One could argue that Scholz’s approach is business as usual. For decades, large German enterprises have encouraged the government to work with authoritarian regimes, creating a Germany highly dependent on bad actors.
Indonesia set to penalise sex outside marriage in overhaul of criminal code | Reuters – the new code could be passed by as early as next week. The code, if passed, would apply to Indonesian citizens and foreigners alike, with business groups expressing concern about what damage the rules might have on Indonesia’s image as a holiday and investment destination. – the question is if this is going to take Indonesia on a similar path of economic stagnation as Malaysia has taken?
Twitter’s decline continues. I noticed this morning that Twitter allowed me to post the exact same Twitter post twice. That isn’t something that was possible previously and I could see how it could be used for nefarious reasons.
My twitter account this afternoon when I checked it
Shein Confusion: The Fast-Fashion Giant’s New Resale Site Doesn’t Make Buying Easy — The Information – Annie tries out Shein Exchange, the e-commerce brand’s foray into the bustling resale market. On its face, the platform seems like a good idea, given the ongoing controversies over Shein’s cheap, disposable, landfill-clogging apparel. But there is something distinctly off about the brand’s effort to sell used clothes
Amazon’s new AI tool may take over work from employees facing layoffs and buyouts – Vox – the tech giant has been working for at least the last year to hand over some of its recruiters’ tasks to an AI technology that aims to predict which job applicants across certain corporate and warehouse jobs will be successful in a given role and fast-track them to an interview — without a human recruiter’s involvement. The technology works in part by finding similarities between the resumes of current, well-performing Amazon employees and those of job applicants applying for similar jobs
The US Army’s Land Warrior programme was in development for some 33 years. The idea behind it is that better informed soldiers who are connected to support assets can do more with less and survive.
Chris Capelluto put together a good accessible history of the programme.
Burning chrome
About a decade after the rise of cyberpunk developed as a literature genre, the defence thinkers realised the potential of modern technologies that would have sounded similar to Case’s cyber deck in Neuromancer.
Head up displays, small but connected and powerful networked computers and connected weapon sights of the Land Warrior programme have taken over three decades to fulfil the original vision. Technology takes time, while Land Warrior has taken three plus decades; artificial intelligence is taking a lot longer again.
Human factors
Even now the Land Warrior programme isn’t completely sorted. The Microsoft Halolens AR displays are said to cause debilitating nausea, headaches and eye strain. More than 80% of those who experienced discomfort suffered symptoms within three hours of using the Land Warrior AR headset.
The wearable computer of the Land Warrior programme is an Android powered Smartphone sized device, but would be using very different networks. The network is both the strength and the point of weakness in the Land Warrior programme.
How the networked structures of Land Warrior will fully affect military culture and power structures will be interesting. All of it will be creating tensions in the millennia of ‘hard-wiring’ humans have had since before the dawn of civilisation as we know it and the impact will be much deeper than just the physical tiredness from head up display googles.
Just think about the benefits and ills of social media, or how the world has shrunk through video calls. In my parent’s lifetime, people leaving their homes in Ireland to emigrate to the US or Australia used to have a wake at their leaving. In some respects that departure was a form of death. That is very different to the relationship that I have with family and friends around the world now. Changes coming through from Land Warrior might be equally deep over time.
A lament for the age of apathy | Financial Times – Turnout in the US election of 1996 fell below 50 per cent. In Britain five years later, it was the lowest since the Great war. Most pop culture either side of the millennium wasn’t even allusively or allegorically political. You can read Jane Austen — goes the old line — without knowing that Napoleon was cutting through Europe. You can watch Friends without knowing that America has a government. The peak of the apolitical age was Big Brother, which, in sealing contestants from the news, didn’t disrupt their lives much. – I think a large amount of society still live in that bubble
I was watching this video and I could it imagine something similar being done to describe the luck of many market towns in the west of Ireland with the identikit feel
The video below is a good run down on the short term aspects of the current state of the UK economy. However UK productivity has been going wrong for decades. Several reasons:
The UK relies on services rather than manufacturing – While the UK was in the EU, those factories that remained imported more productive workers from the east. With Brexit the manufacturing and warehouses went east instead along with income tax revenues
The UK has a serious skills gap, there isn’t the prevalence of night colleges any more
The UK has been declining in automation. The classic example is trying to find an automatic car wash. During the 1970s and 1980s these were all over the UK. Now you get a bunch of people with buckets. UK warehouses are much less automated than most other places. This is partly down to several decades of short termism that Will Hutton wrote about back in The State We’re In circa 1995
Brexit has permanently re-eingineered supply chains around the UK
Too much UK investment has gone into real estate, you only have to see all the developments in London and Manchester
Universities are now developed for the benefit of foriegn students rather than domestic talent growth, innovation. And the universities are over leveraged in property development and are likely to go under if there is a reduction in foreign students or a rise in interest rates
Epson to End All Laser Printer Sales by 2026 – ExtremeTech – quietly chosen to stop selling laser printer hardware by 2026. The company will instead focus on its more environmentally-friendly inkjet printers, according to a statement obtained by The Register. Although the company stopped selling laser printers in the United States a while back, it had maintained the line in other markets, including Europe and Asia. Consumers will no longer be able to purchase new Epson laser printers as of 2026, but Epson has promised to continue supporting existing customers via supplies and spare parts. Epson itself claims its inkjets are up to 85 percent more energy efficient than its laser units and produce 85 percent less carbon dioxide. Interesting move, western companies would be virtue signalling the hell out of this.
Really impressive piece of technology and engineering by Sony. But I can’t work out why it was done. By this time Citizen, Casio and Sony were already making LCD televisions. Back in the day Sony used to some products, just because the engineers could. I also love how this looks like a miniature version of a Sony 14″ portable TV circa 1984, even down to the homage to the Trinitron branding.
There seems to be a lack of appreciation for economic trajectory that Hong Kong is on; inextricably linked in China
They don’t seem to understand the political trajectory Hong Kong is on
They aren’t the kind of talent that Hong Kong needs to plug losses in healthcare, education, social services and the creative industries
More developed countries aren’t likely to want ‘stepping stone’ Chinese people from Hong Kong. Their choices might be as limited as are on the mainland
This will only accelerate simmering nativist hostility and more Hong Kongers may leave via BNO visas etc.
If Hong Kong has been in a recession, what must the real state of the China economy be? Are they way worse than PMI and official numbers seem to suggest?
Finally, China has disliked Hong Kong being a vehicle for capital flight. With a greying workforce and declining birth rate will they dislike the talent flight of middle class Chinese through ‘stepping stone’ Hong Kong?
Ideas
Interesting viewpoint on Russia from author Ian Garner. You can find out more about his book here.
China’s puffer jacket obsession: Its not just Moncler and Canada Goose, homegrown brands are taking off | Campaign Asia – Domestic Chinese and international puffer jacket brands are battling for market share in the mainland. We take a look at which names are emerging victorious. China’s puffer jacket obsession: Its not just Moncler and Canada Goose, homegrown brands are taking offWhen temperatures in China started to cool down in early October, one of the biggest fashion trends to return was the puffer jacket. Alongside higher-priced brands like Canada Goose — which saw 20 percent higher sales compared to the previous year — homegrown puffer jacket labels such as Bosideng, Xue Zhong Fei, and Yaya all reported that their gross merchandise value (GMV) growth rate on Tmall exceeded 100 percent. Meanwhile, European brand Moncler sold out of its classic Maya coat on the first day of its debut on Tmall Luxury Pavilion in October.
Media
Why Hong Kong’s outdoor advertising is underperforming | Media | Campaign Asia – Based on a recent study by Hong Kong Baptist University, OOH ads are failing to capture people as they severely lack creativity. Dang, I feel bad for you son, that’s burn to the Hong Kong agency scene right there. Seriously though I would be curious about the methodology
The $300 Million Sneaker King Comes Undone – WSJ – In May, Mr. Malekzadeh’s fiancée—also the company’s finance chief—pushed for both of them to come clean, according to people familiar with the situation. Federal prosecutors a few months later charged the couple with bank fraud and Mr. Malekzadeh with wire fraud and money laundering. Customers claim they paid millions of dollars for shoes that never arrived. A court-appointed receiver is sorting out the remaining inventory of the entrepreneur’s company, Zadeh Kicks. Early last year, Mr. Malekzadeh collected orders for about 600,000 pairs of Air Jordan 11 Cool Grey sneakers months before they hit stores, netting over $70 million, according to prosecutors. He priced the sneakers between $115 and $200 a pair, cheaper than their expected retail price of around $225
Hackers breach energy orgs via bugs in discontinued web server – state-backed Chinese hacking groups (including one traced as RedEcho) targeted multiple Indian electrical grid operators, compromising an Indian national emergency response system and the subsidiary of a multinational logistics company. The attackers gained access to the internal networks of the hacked entities via Internet-exposed cameras on their networks as command-and-control servers. – The software being hacked is the Boa web server. Boa was originally written by university student Paul Phillips. Phillips became CTO of Go2Net.
Go2Net ran several websites including 100Hot – a website ranking service; payment processing service Authorize.Net, metasearch engine Dogpile, Haggle Online who provided online auction and PlaySite who ran multiplayer games.Prior to being acquired by InfoSpace Go2Net touted their technology behind these sites and selling services to customers.
Boa’s afterlife on IoT systems
So having a CTO who had written a small footprint web server like Boa made a lot of sense. At some point, Phillips stopped working on Boa. Instead maintenance was handed over Larry Doolittle and Jon Nelson who maintained the code for three years or so. Since then, Boa has not been maintained. Its small size made it very popular with Internet of Things products including CCTV systems. Which is the reason why Boa server software has been repeatedly hacked.
How you treat the ‘non-elite’ is key to beating populism | Financial Times – Middle-status people, social scientists have shown, are more conservative and cautious than the poor (who can afford to take risks because they have so little to lose) and elites (whose privilege allows them to bounce back from failures). They show more respect for authority for a simple reason: being “disruptive” may be highly valued among Silicon Valley elites but, in blue- or pink-collar jobs, it merely gets you fired
Ethics
Kanye West Used Porn, Bullying, ‘Mind Games’ to Control Staff – Rolling Stone – West looked down at his foot, stared up at the woman, and told her, “I want you to make me a shoe I can fuck.” Adidas representatives — including a vice president involved in the apparel giant’s billion-dollar licensing partnership with West’s influential brand — did not confront West about his alleged remark, the two attendees claim. The woman took a leave of absence before moving to a job elsewhere at Adidas (in an email, she declined to comment and requested that her name be withheld from this article.) Former Yeezy and Adidas employees, however, point to the alleged incident as one of many experiences — over the course of a decade — in which, they say, West used intimidation tactics with the staff of his fashion empire that were provocative, frequently sexualized, and often directed toward women. – what were Adidas doing and why the sudden change of conscience now, when all this was going on for the best part of a decade?
Metabolism and the capsule building were a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Its a much more expansive vision of manufactured housing than post war pre-fab housing in the west.
Rolex Is Reportedly Building a New $1 Billion Factory – Robb Report – it sounds like a large amount of money. However tooling on a car production line would be 150+ million pounds alone. Rolex makes everything on site, rather than relying on a range of supplier partners. 1 Billion dollars almost sounds cheap.
‘We’re mandating its use’: Estée Lauder turns to TikTok marketing after reach on Instagram stalls – Digiday – When Estée Lauder’s reach on Instagram started to slow across EMEA, its marketers turned to TikTok. Obviously, there’s more to it. The early success of the brand’s global TikTok account, for one. But the crux of the brand’s decision to be on TikTok came down to Instagram. Estée Lauder’s marketers realized that no matter how big they tried to go in terms of reaching more people on the Meta-owned social network, they were stuck talking to a limited part of its desired audience, said Lubna Mohsin, the social media and content manager for Estée Lauder. Moreover, it was the same core people in the same cohort who were being reached over and again
The tragic romance of China and Hollywood – The China Project – “Beijing offered up access to its market in exchange for a decade-long tutorial from Hollywood on how to replicate its filmmaking process.” Now that China has caught up (somewhat), there’s less incentive to collaborate. Beijing-based director Daniel Zhao agrees, with a caveat. “The overarching policy of the central government now is to build a self-reliant ecosystem (自循环 zìxúnhuán), but I do see gaps where China still needs to import international technology and personnel,” Zhao told The China Project. He has worked in China’s film industry for over a decade, including a stint with Fenton’s company DMG. China’s film industry has made great strides, thanks in part to its Hollywood’s partnerships. It is now home to some of the largest production sites in the world. China is rapidly developing new virtual production capabilities and improving its 3-D animation quality. In recent years, China has demonstrated that it can pioneer fresh aesthetics and produce domestic successes without Hollywood’s guidance.
How retailers are reshaping the advertising industry | Financial Times – shopper marketing for e-tailing. Interesting how this budget would likely have been previously spent on paid placement in Google Shopping etc. and yet now in the shift to mobile Google (and other search engines) are now losing out on the opportunity for product search. Part of this is them re-optimising around local search like where’s the nearest coffee shop with free wifi and CBD infused kombucha? Meanwhile online retail destinations like eBay and Amazon became product search engines
What about the layoffs at Meta and Twitter? Elon is crazy! WTF??? | I, Cringely – I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no big deal. This, too, shall pass – vintage Bob Cringely
The idea of the disruption crisis came from a series of conversations that I have been having in recent times and recent online news.
TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 Day Two – May 23, 2012 (Photo: Devin Coldewey)
What is the disruption crisis?
The rise of big tech such as Meta, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Bytedance, Alibaba and Tencent drove a wave of digital disruption over the past quarter century. Now the disruptors are being disrupted themselves and I think that they may precipitate a disruption crisis.
Continuing to look to these digital disruptors is the equivalent of Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker being held up as an exemplar of a good husband and faithful spouse.
Mass lay-offs
Others have talked about the layoffs in more depth, so I have included a video explanation.
I started my agency career during the dot com bubble. We had going for growth at all costs. They talked about trying to move at ‘internet speed’. This was down to the go for growth funding model that drove start-ups through their angel and VC funding rounds and beyond. Common sense was often set aside. if this sounds 180 degrees away from the lean start-up model you’re not wrong.
…Amazon made big bets on long plays, willing to sacrifice immediate profitability to boost its overall position in blue ocean markets. When Amazon’s had to play catch-up, it largely hasn’t worked: the Kindle Phone is maybe the most high-profile mistake/missed opportunity, just to name one. It’s hard to deny that this loss-leader approach has been key to Amazon’s success, although it often made the company a mystery to Wall Street. This would signify a huge shift, totally aside from the 3% of employees who will likely leave the company.
Hacking away at the Devices and R&D divisions is the most perplexing to me. These are the sources of Amazon’s most signature successes, with the Kindle, Alexa/Echo, and Fire TV. They’re what hook customers when they’re still kids, and that customers above all associate with the company, even as they help ensure loyalty and drive their share of media purchases and retail revenue. The Kindle, like the Echo and the Fire Stick, was always supposed to be a loss leader: you sell the razor at close to cost and make your money back selling the blades. How many books has Amazon sold because of the Kindle? How many Prime subscriptions? How many impulse purchases do people make on their Echos and Fires?
Tim Carmody, Loss Leaders. (Issue #50) Amazon Chronicles
Consultants have taken the idea of transformative technology and scrappy startup methodologies to try and reinvent business, or facilitate digital disruption. The problem is that the examples they use as exemplars are failing, casting doubt on their doctrine and fuelling a disruption crisis in boardrooms and the consultants that advise them.
Unilever – a cautionary tale
For instance, I contracted at Unilever. I worked rolling out digital brand assets for their Family Brands product line. This was a line of margarines, due to organic growth it has different names in different markets:
Blue Band
Country Crock
Flora
Fruit d’Or
Margarina Primavera
Plantta
Rama
While I was doing this work, I worked closely with the Becel functional foods and Bertorelli brands. Family Brands was being put into a separate business to develop a ‘startup mentality’. The thing was Family Brands hadn’t been a startup for decades. In fact, it hadn’t been a startup since the 1870s when Antoon Jurgens branched out from trading in butter and started to manufacture margarine. His company merged with rivals Van den Bergh’s, Centra, and Schicht’s to form Margarine Unie (Margarine Union) in 1927, by which time it had a dominant position in margarine manufacturing.
Three years later, Margarine Unie merges with Lever Brothers Limited to create Unilever and the rest was history.
Margarine as a substitute good
Margarine historically was a substitute product for butter. My parents (both of whom came from farming families in Ireland) used to talk about how poor children in the towns would have eaten margarine rather than butter. As a child, we might use margarine to bake a cake, but if we wanted the cake to keep a while my Granny or my Mam would only use salted butter. Despite butter (which we kept in the fridge) being so hard that it might break up the surface of the bread, we used it on our sandwiches, toast or to fry with. Margarine just wasn’t the done thing.
One of the most damning things that my Granny once said about a friend of hers was:
She uses margarine to make the ham sandwiches when you’re invited around for a cup of tea.
One of the first courses that I had at university was in economics, where they used margarine as an exemplar for a substitute good.
Healthier option
Margarine started to be considered a healthier option due to concerns about heart disease and cholesterol. Much of this was down to Flora, invented in 1964, which contained polyunsaturated fats derived from sunflower oil. At the same time wholemeal bread started to become preferable due to the requirement for fibre in the diet.
Yellow fats category decline
However Although 21st century sales declined as many consumers switched to butter. This was down to changes in consumers wanting a more natural product and heart health improvising. In the five years leading to 2014, sales of margarine fell 6%, while sales of butter rose 7%.
It was in this atmosphere that the startup narrative was fired up for Family Brands.
The other shoe dropped when Unilever narrowly managed to fight a hostile bid from 3G Capital a couple of years after I was there. Paul Polman got rid of business lower margin businesses as an attempt to increase earnings. These were still great businesses which is why KKR were happy to take the business off Unilever’s hands.
Unilever didn’t spin out a startup. It wasn’t disruptive thinking, it was an act of desperation to fend off takeovers or possible greenmailing. The problem with with this is Unilever now has a lot less buying power on global supplies of oils and fats needed for its ice cream, mayonnaise, food additives and personal care businesses – which was the rationale for forming Unilever in the first place.
Foundational technologies in crisis bringing crisis
Foundational technologies were cited as new elements that would cause digital disruption. The fall of these technologies and the companies that have championed them have fuelled this disruption crisis.
Cloud services
Microsoft and Amazon both saw declining sales in SaaS and related services, as businesses has less employees and needed less seats. Amazon has been cutting deep in its R&D function and devices. This means that Alexa for the hospitality industry and health sectors are likely to be borrowed time.
Web 3.0 (blockchain, NFTs, cryptocurrency)
Here’s what my friend Nigel Scott had to say about FTX on LinkedIn:
There has been a lot of commentary over the weekend on the #ftx #cryptocurrency #exchange collapse
A lot of words have been typed and spoken but in the end I think the numbers probably sum it up best
Back in 2018 there was an estimated 200 Crypto Exchanges scattered around the globe
Over the past 3 years an estimated 200 Crypto Exchanges have either collapsed or disappeared
This rate of attrition is nothing new. Back in 2014 – after the Mt Gox event – it was estimated 45% of all #Crypto Exchanges had either collapsed or disappeared
The harsh truth is the risk of failure has always been central, rather than peripheral, to the Crypto Exchange model
Today there are almost 600 Crypto Exchanges open for business
The only question that needs to be asked is what fraction of them will still be in business in 2023, 2024, 2025 and beyond?
and, more importantly, what is the probability of picking a survivor, never mind a winner, in such a volatile environment?
Which is to say, contrary to most of the commentary I have read over the weekend, the #ftxcrash isn’t the exception, it’s the rule – what makes it exceptional is the scale, not the probability of the failure
Blast radius
One edition of the Axios Login newsletter used the headline ‘blast radius‘ describe the impact that FTX and other crypto economy problems were having on the wider Web 3.0 ecosystem of decentralised services. Creating a disruption crisis.
Less than four years before disruptive technologies had become mainstream when IBM brought a ‘better way’ of managing supply chain for Walmart by putting their heads of lettuce on the blockchain. Just writing that last sentence made me like my IQ number was dropping; but just four years ago, this was a point of validation…
Metaverse
Prior to Meta’s recent financial results and job cuts you had the likes of McKinsey cheerleading for the metaverse.
With its potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore.
To give you an idea of how far we are from the much vaunted metaverse, have a look at my discussion paper.
Social media marketing
Alphabet has seen a decline in YouTube advertising and search advertising is down by about a fifth in October. Twitter is heading towards bankruptcy as brands stopped advertising on the platform. Meta has also shown a decline in advertising revenue. Snap is doing much worse. TikTok seems to be the outlier.
Accenture and the disruption crisis
A quick search of Accenture and disruption yields about 628,000 results. Accenture has latched itself onto disruption in the same way that IBM glommed on to e-business during the first dot com bomb, Sun Microsystems became the ‘dot in dot com’ and the whole of the entire enterprise IT industry latched on to the millennium bug.
Better than ‘the dot in dot com’
Some bright minds at Accenture came up with a concept that was ownable, not time-bounded like ‘e-business’ or ‘the dot in dot com’ – you’re kind of done when everyone has a website that can do transactions of some sort.
Sun Microsystems advert circa 2000
Accenture welded itself to disruption with the Disruptibility Index which looks at how disruption affects different vertical markets.
Dark thoughts
Disruption tapped into deep negative behavioural emotions. Fear, uncertainty and doubt. As tech executive Andy Grove had constantly repeated ‘Only the Paranoid Survive‘. Disruption didn’t necessarily promise a thriving business due to sustained competitive advantage, like earlier generations of technology companies and consultancies. Instead it promised, merely survival in a globalised hostile world, with constant waves of disruption coming at the c-suite. This is the business equivalent of Adam Curtis’ video essay Oh Dearism.
This gives your internal champions on the client side a bit more political space if their digital transformation projects doesn’t hit all the goals that we would like it to hit.
Of course all of this could come off the wheels if a great disruption crisis hit, wouldn’t it?
The disruption crisis doesn’t just toll for Accenture
It would be remiss of me to just single out Accenture. They have been part of a much bigger movement across professional services, finance, the technology sector and academia. Here are some of the people across academia have had a similar idea to Accenture; they’ve written books like these over the past 10 years or so:
It has been the fodder of countless conferences around the world. For example here’s a representative of Euromonitor International speaking at a conference of the International Homeware Association (IHA) on digital disruption.
I am not putting this in here to make fun of the IHA – it is the professional association of a market worth 80 billion dollars a year globally and deserves our respect. Globalisation has centralised a lot of homeware production in the Far East due to globalisation over the past quarter of a century; but it still plays a central, if less visible part in our lives today.
Instead I am using the IHA as an exemplar of how digital disruption has pervaded all parts of the economy as a central organising principle in modern business thinking.
China’s Diaspora Policy under Xi Jinping – Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik – China estimates the number of people of Chinese origin outside the People’s Republic to be 60 million. Beijing considers them all to be nationals of China, regardless of their citizenship. Xi Jinping views overseas Chinese as playing an “irreplaceable role” in China’s rise as a world power. Beijing is working hard to harness overseas Chinese resources for its own goals in the fields of economics, science and technology, as well as diplomacy and soft power. Beijing also expects people of Chinese origin in Germany to deepen relations between China and Germany. But not only that: As “unofficial ambassadors”, they are also expected to spread China’s narratives to the German public, defend China’s “core interests”, and help with the transfer of knowledge and technology to China. – This explains foreign police stations to ‘help the Chinese diaspora and considers Singapore to be a ‘Chinese state’. To realise how ridiculous this sounds, imagine Ireland berating the United States for not towing the line because it is an Irish state. I was surprised at the relatively small size of the Chinese diaspora at only 60 million, Ireland claims 70 million people of Irish descent. And that’s even allowing for the fact that the Irish minority in mainland Britain is declining in number due to an ageing community. If you want to know more about the government of China and its efforts to influence the Chinese diaspora, I can recommend reading Hamilton & Ohlberg’s – The Hidden Hand.
It’s hard to believe that fast food restaurants were innovative 40 years ago. McDonald’s haven’t changed their tray designs at all. The idea of it being fast and clean doesn’t feel so fast or clean now given the small of the restaurant and greasy stainless steel counter sides.
Magic: The Slathering | Financial Times“We are downgrading Hasbro to Underperform after conducting a deep dive on the company’s Magic: The Gathering business. Hasbro is overproducing Magic cards which has propped up recent results but is destroying the long-term value of the brand. Card prices are falling, game stores are losing money, collectors are liquidating and large retailers are cutting orders.”
