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End of the beginning or beginning of the end?
Alex Leslie - Feb 19, 10:00 AM
In 1998 I took a bet with a colleague. He said that by 2002 newspapers would cease to exist. He said that in trains there would be small screens by each seat through which you could read the newspapers and magazines. I bet him $20 that newspapers would still be alive and well in 2002.
I have not been able to collect my winnings because I haven’t seen him since he sold his company and sailed off round the world.
The question is not whether he was right (but 10-15 years adrift) or wrong – or whether he was a good business man – but about something we do with technology.
We do it when something new comes along. We did it when desktop publishing arrived. We thought that the only possible way to publish anything from that moment on was with desktop publishing technology. I was part of a team that published one the very first completely desktop published magazines. It took about ten times as long as it would have done if we had been sensible and used a mix of desktop publishing technologies and other, more traditional techniques.
Our industry did it again when e-billing was introduced. We thought that paper would be banished, the environment would be saved and we would save huge amounts of money.
We did it with a number of customer contact technologies – IVR and then web based, self service technologies and more recently chat and who knows what will be next.
Each time a new technology comes along we herald the death of almost all other technologies that do the same job.
And every time we seem to forget that customers like choice. We forget that technology is primarily evolutionary – a process which hopefully makes our lives a little bit better or easier with each new revelation.
We get so good at heralding the death of things we extend the predictions of doom to entire industries. This week the newspaper industry is apparently dead.
We forget (again) that we read newspapers in different ways. During the week we are looking for news and specific areas of interest to investigate which is changing the way we gather news, but at the weekends we browse, picking up stories that grab our interest along the way.
Television is the same. We are now convinced that we want to be in charge of own television schedules. Well, I am not. Imagine being able to watch your favourite show endlessly, evening after evening. Not only would they soon run out of new story lines but you would get bored, you would find another ‘favourite’ programme, your old favourite programme would go off the air – everyone would lose.
In almost every part of our lives similar things are happening. The death of books as a result of the birth of e-books? I don’t think so. Did video kill going to see a movie – quite the opposite – film goers are on the increase. Is social media the downfall of social life? It is a laughable thought – we are social animals and our computers are not our friends.
We now wonder whether telecoms is the enemy of television? We wonder whether the new television technologies are the dagger in the heart of films or telecoms? Will mobile devices supersede all others?
No. Parts of our familiar world will disappear but one new concept or technology will not sweep away all others.
The only question in my mind is where billing should sit and I have this lovely idea: at the moment every device is owned by a different technology industry – we cannot have one subscription that covers say, Sky, on our televisions as well as on our computers and televisions. So if billing, as the enabler of really good customer service that can cater for many different technologies and services, were to sit quite close to the customer and at the intersection of all these technologies and services – that might just be a very powerful idea.
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