It’s that time of year when some feel compelled to prognosticate on “what will happen next year,” while others remind us of what did happen “last year.” And there always are a brave few who will try to capture the essence in a single phrase: “the year of X,” whatever X is said to be.
At a high level, we might well look back at such highly-distilled “year of X” predictions and note that it almost never happens. “The year of X,” whatever X is said to be, nearly always occurs (in the sense of commercial adoption or inflection point of adoption) some future year.
My simple way of describing this situation is to say that “whatever is said to be the ‘year of X’ trend almost ensures it will not be.” Of course, some will argue that is not what they mean.
Instead, they tend to mean this is the year some trend is popularized or discovered. Okay, in that sense, there is firmer--yet still tenuous--ground to stand on. Rarely does a big new thing just burst on the scene, in terms of public awareness, in a decisively-new way,
What does happen is that some arbiter “proclaims” that this has happened. It’s arbitrary.
The point is that any truly-significant new technology, platform or commercial activity takes quite some time to reach commercialization, and typically quite long after all the hype has been crushed by disillusionment.
The point is that even highly-successful new technologies can take decades to reach commercial ubiquity, even if today’s software-driven products are adopted faster than innovations of the past.
It still can take a decade for widespread consumer use of any product or service to reach 50 percent to 60 percent adoption.
Also, recall that most new products, and most new companies fail: they simply never succeed as commercial realities. Also, we sometimes overestimate the actual time any innovation takes to reach 10 percent or some other level of adoption on a mass level.
There is debate about how fast smartphones were adopted for example. Was it seven years or something greater than a decade for usage to reach half of consumers? Some estimate it took just seven years. Others have argued adoption never reached 50 percent after a decade.
And depending on how one defines “smartphone,” adoption levels of 50 percent took a couple of decades to nearly three decades.
For all such reasons, some of us tend to discount the notion of a “year of X.” Truly-significant innovations which achieve mass usage often take longer than expected to reach mass adoption levels. On the other hand, there arguably are points in time when public awareness seems to reach something like an inflection point.
In most cases it is difficult to measure the actual year when a shift becomes significant. Is it the point where 10 percent of people recognize a term, or say it is important? Or when 20 percent, 30 percent or 40 percent say so?
More significantly, at what point of innovation purchase or regular usage has something “arrived,” in a commercial sense?
No comments:
Post a Comment