When I was a student in England in the 1990s, I often gave talks about the rise of the internet, which was still a new and relatively misunderstood concept. Back then, the idea that this could fundamentally reshape how we live, work, and do business seemed far-fetched to many.
One story that stands out involved a small family-owned cookie maker in Whitby, England, called Botham’s of Whitby. (Whitby, interestingly, is the same port that Captain James Cook set out from to chart previously unexplored lands.) This family was one of the early adopters of e-commerce, I told my audience, explaining how this traditional business was leveraging the new digital world to reach customers far beyond the Yorkshire area.
I remember the skeptical chuckles and laughter from the audience. The idea of buying baked goods online seemed absurd to people. “Who would order cookies on the internet?”
But the cookie maker saw the future, recognizing the Internet’s potential long before it became mainstream. And while others laughed, it was busy launching a business model that would change the world.
Waves of technology are breaking fast
As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The technology waves that we’ve lived through—the shift from analog to digital, the rise of the internet, the migration to the cloud, etc.—can inform and illuminate us as we prepare to unlock the full potential of AI, quantum and other technologies.
The challenge is that technological waves are breaking faster these days. And waiting or pausing is not an option.
We’ve entered an era where the speed of change is exponential, with each innovation building on previous ones. While it took the rise of the Internet 16 years to fully permeate business and society, we no longer have the luxury of a long-term adoption and experimentation phase. Each new wave doesn’t just introduce new tools; it creates new business models, leaving room for anyone to seize the opportunity.
For example, in a matter of years, cloud computing completely changed how we work. Suddenly, you could spin up a website from a laptop at a coffee shop, paying for only the computing power you used. And entire industries were transformed. This democratization of access allowed small startups to compete with established giants.
The release of the iPhone brought another seismic shift. Suddenly, with social media apps and the web literally in the palm of…
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