Shift happens

We all know that the pace of change today is getting faster and faster. It's almost incomprehensible to me that going back a couple of decades or so, when I first got into technology, there was for most people no internet and no mobile phones. PCs were just getting started properly (my first PC had no Windows OS, an awesome 30Mb of hard disk space and floppy disks as big as your head). And if you wanted to find something out, your local library was probably the best bet.

To put where we are today into some context, take a look at the following video:

While the predictions will undoubtedly be false as they always are, the existing stats on their own are pretty impressive. The one that got me: if myspace was a country, it would be the 11th largest in the world.

One of the things that this drives home is that flux is a permanent state of affairs. There is no certainty about anything – and all the focus groups in the world will not provide the answers. Everything is in beta and the successful companies of tomorrow will be those that chart their own destination but who also remain flexible about exactly how they get there.

This is the age of plan B.