January 1, 2000, Volume 3 - Number 1
The Day After New Year's Day
Did the world end or do I stilll have to go to work?
If you are reading this column, then the Y2K problem has turned out to be less serious than many people thought. Well, if you are reading a handwritten manuscript on birch bark or parchment, then maybe Western civilization did collapse after all. (My editor paid me a bonus to write this column in advance, just in case, so I cannot be completely sure, but I will cash the check fast.)
Usually, at year end, publishers ask columnists to make some predictions about the coming year. I am always wrong. Because this is the end of millennium, trying to predict how the next century or millennium will be is even more absurd. But I'll try anyway.
My father grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. He viewed the world as organized into stable hierarchies. His perspective was due in part to his career in the military, but extended into a more general world view. He expected that all large organizations social, political, religious, and so on would change at a smooth rate or remain stable. So the future was predictable, within limits. My Dad's world is gone for good.
1) Organizations are not stable and are becoming less so. If you look at the Fortune 100 Corporation list over time, you will find that most companies on that list have had life spans less than a human being.
Now, look at the organizational charts and product lines of the surviving companies and determine whether they are really the same companies they were 20 or 30 years ago.
2) More organizations are not hierarchies. The future enterprise model is the Hollywood movie, where a team of talent is assembled for a particular project. Once the project is completed, someone stays around to handle the distribution and collection of funds, but the team members go on to other projects.
3) People do not want to belong to traditional organizations. Did you know that temps will do most of the work in the United States? Temps used to include only manual labor and low level-clerical workers; today, temps can be IT staff and specialized consultants. So the best people do not work for you, but you can rent them.
4) Sellers no longer set the price, unless they have a true monopoly. Brand identification is still important, but brands easily lose popularity, and people are more willing to shop around. The Internet gives consumers auctions, instant price comparisons, and information on almost anything they want to buy.
A small company with a Web site can look better than a monster corporation.
Socialists objected that, in pure capitalism, perfect markets were impossible, and government had to intervene. We now have the perfect college economics-textbook marketplace conditions. And you will notice what happened to socialism and communism at the end of this century.
5) The physical world has not been and will not be replaced by the virtual world. But the physical world is much smaller. For example, I am a consultant who has a skill (SQL knowledge), an English speaker, and a U.S. dollar holder. Because I'm an Army brat, I travel anywhere, eat anything, and can talk to almost anyone without breaking local taboos. I do not think of traveling overseas as any different from going to another U.S. city.
The corporate fear that a major customer can enslave us is gone, because we can find more customers elsewhere on Earth. Likewise, customers have access to multiple supply lines from any point in case they do not like us.
The turn-of-the-century pneumatic-tube message system could not go outside a building, and messenger services were expensive. By simply reducing physical travel expense and time, telegraphs and telephones have made some major changes in business and society.
I can see the day when I will not travel to deliver my product. I will teleconference from my house for my SQL classes instead, because teleconferencing technology will be so cheap that I can buy it off a shelf or find it in a box of cornflakes.
In a few years, I will probably be happy to accept Euros in lieu of dollars, if I can trade them for goods and services on the Web.
I can already get local currency from ATMs anywhere on Earth. Soon, every company will be multinational and deal with foreign suppliers directly. I am hoping that machine translation will get both good and cheap enough to get me access to the non-English speaking world. That is not as far out as it sounds.
6) We'll need middlemen more than ever. I hate to market myself, and I am bad at it. I do not have the tools or the time and would rather be doing “geek stuff” on my computer. In short, I need an agent, which gets us back to the Hollywood movie business model. I don't care if my agent is made of flesh or software, just as long as that agent can do the job. The person with the best “little black book” is the most important person to my business.
7) Property is not going to be the same. What about my databases? There will still be proprietary data in company databases, but more and more, the data that is useful on a daily basis will be in public access. Research has been expensive in the past, but now it is easy. Data mining across multiple databases will be standard practice, but the glut of data is going to hide more than it shows. Much like a craftsman at the start of the industrial revolution, the database guru is going to bring his own tools from job to job and depend on word-of-mouth recommendations.
Intellectual property is becoming harder to defend. Unless someone can find new technology and get people to accept it, we may stop trying a defense at some point in the next millennium. For example, if I publish a book, I can try to collect a fee from anyone who downloads it from my Web site, but that will not stop them from making their own copies. However, I could offer advanced sales, downloads of the first reads, a fee for an authenticated copy (will first files have collectors value, like first editions in hardcopy?), or some other incentive to pay. We will return to the situation we had before copyright laws, but a lot of great literature was written under those conditions.
Now look at the problem from the buyer's side. How does he know that I have this great book for sale in the first place, when there are two billion Web sites offering books? The buyer might know my name and like my material, but if he doesn't, he needs a trusted book reviewer.
8) Not everyone is happy with where we're going. At the same time that the world is becoming more dynamic, a very untraditional mix of opponents to the changes is forming. The old terms “left” and “right” really do not apply. Very left-of-center labor groups and reactionary conservatives like Pat Buchanan become allies against NAFTA and other free trade agreements. Al Gore, Red China, and fundamentalist religious groups become allies in favor of censorship and eavesdropping on citizens on the Internet.
They may not like each other, but they fear change above all. The speed of the change frightens reactionaries as much as the changes themselves. Leftists fear the loss of control, taxation and regulation, and the centralized power that makes their planning possible. This observation is not mine, so I recommend that you read a copy of The Future and its Enemies by Virginia Postrel (Free Press, 1998) and add it to your Toffler books.
Do not count these enemies out just yet. People have always been willing to slaughter and enslave others when their world view is challenged.
Joe Celko is an Atlanta-based independent consultant. He is the author of three
books on SQL -- SQL For Smarties (Morgan-Kaufmann, 1995),
SQL Puzzles and Answers (Morgan-Kaufmann, 1995), and
Instant SQL Programming (Wrox Press, 1997) -- and wrote the SQL for Smarties column for DBMS
magazine. You can contact him via email at www.celko.com or 71062.1056@compuserve.com.
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