Technological progress has the power to wipe out businesses overnight. In the new global economy, only those that anticipate change and adapt to it will survive
For the corporate world, technology creates both opportunities and fears. The rise and fall of commercial enterprises – once vibrant, dynamic, and even dominant, but brought to the brink of bankruptcy and beyond in just a few decades – is a fact of business life.
We have seen whole sections of industries wiped out by technological progress. We need only think of the impact that the automobile had, not only on the carriage industry, but also on saddle makers and the providers of feed and stables for horses. Each new technological wave usually has its victims, and it tends to be those who were unable to change in time.
But time has now been compressed. In the past, there was usually some time lag between the discovery of new processes or products and their complete victory over their predecessors. New products might have been far better but they were seldom cheaper. It took a long time, perhaps a generation or more, for novel inventions to percolate downward as their price declined. Think, in the recent past, how long it took video cameras to move from being an expensive luxury to an affordable mass-market product.
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