We constantly focus on the future. We talk endlessly about innovation and recreation and building new business models. In all that discussion, we may sometimes overlook the long transition period to the new order. We may also miss the fact that the status quo will also have powerful champions and may survive well past what one might have thought initially.
Take a look at PCs. The first signs of weakness in their industry came as laptops started to rise. After laptops came netbooks. Still later, tablets were all the rage. Despite all of the massive change in the industry, PCs have survived in new forms.
This post by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times covers this very point. He references something Steve Jobs once said to him in an interview:
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm,” Mr. Jobs said. But as farming died off and people in urban areas began to buy automobiles, the auto market split into distinct categories. There were easy to use, relatively maintenance-free cars for everyday drivers, and powerful, specialty vehicles like trucks for people who needed to get stuff done. Laptops and desktops “are going to be like trucks,” Mr. Jobs predicted. “They’re still going to be around. They’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one out of x people.”
The rest of the article is a discussion of the new Apple iMac Retina 5K. As the new world continues to evolve, it will be important for us to remember that there is still a great deal of benefit in servicing the old one....
Here is the link to the full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/technology/personaltech/retina-5k-imac-powerful-proof-of-the-pc-renaissance.html?ref=t…
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