Tha Fang has dug into his time capsule and posted this little snippet of a presentation I did around the country back in 2001 entitled "Perpetual Revolution".
The background is this: during 2001 I was the e-commerce specialist for Microsoft Australia and I was very concerned about all of the messages being sprouted around the press that "e-commerce is dead". Even people at Microsoft were saying shit like that. I could see Aussie companies stopping their investments in internet and e-business technologies almost as fast as they had started them in 1997. I thought this was a VERY BAD THING because it takes at least five years to change the culture at large companies and I believed they have to be preparing for another e-business boom which would be coming in the not-too-distant-future.
So I wrote a presentation (55 slides I had to get through in 55 minutes) explaining that the vision of e-commerce was spot on, and the main reason we hadn't realized the vision was that the infrastructure (which I categorized as web services, broadband, wireless, always-on devices, etc) wasn't yet in place - BUT IT WOULD BE. I spoke about how I believed all of these things would be in place by 2005 and we would then be on the verge of another tornado. I talked about how the combination of these technologies would empower customers like never before. And I wanted Aussie companies to continue to invest in e-business technology trials in the hope that, five years down the track, they wouldn't be left out in the cold when the next wave of the technology boom happened.
Mike's comment about "vidcasting" refers to the fact that I had someone video the talk when I gave it in Melbourne, then attached the slides using Windows Media, and made it available on the Microsoft intranet.
Well here we are in 2005 and most of those things ARE in place, although none of them are as widely adopted as I would have hoped. I certainly didn't count on 9/11 or the so-called "Iraq war". But this does feel like the beginning of another tornado. Enough of those things are in place to make things like podcasting a reality. How many of us would have imagined this back in 2001? Not I. But I was vidcasting... as Mike says, without knowing it.
Recent Comments