No sooner does one job get swallowed up by the Internet than another one is fast behind it.
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal announced that is was bookkeepers who were on the digital chopping block.
Is no one safe?
Apparently not.
First they came for the factory workers, but I did not speak up, because I was not a factory work.
Then they came for the bookkeepers, but I did not speak up because I was not a bookkeeper…
You get the idea…
Clearly this is a massive case of Creative/Destruction, just like when any other new technology emerged.
The destruction part we all get.
But where is the ‘creative’ part?
Where are the new industries created by the decimation of traditional jobs?
There don’t seem to be all that many of them on the horizon.
And pretty soon computers will be able to write their own code, so don’t think that that’s any kind of panacea.
No.
This ‘industrial revolution’ is inherently different.
One of the things that makes it different is that, unlike say The Industrial Revolution, the Internet Revolution is going to be Winner Take All.
In the Industrial Revolution, there was plenty of room for Second Place or Third Place or even 125th Place. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution you did’t have to be the biggest cloth weaver in Britain to be a big success. You could be the fifth biggest cloth weaver and still make a fortune. You could also set up a small factory and just manufacture a few hundred shirts and still to quite well. The Industrial Revolution was a kind of democratic revolution. All you had to do was embrace the technology and get on with it.
The Internet Revolution is different.
In the Internet Revolution there is no place of second place – let alone 125th.
That is because we are all connected now.
Once you get a digital ‘winner’, it is winner take all.
Like Facebook.
Facebook is the winner and Mark Zuckerberg’s company is worth $135 billion or whatever ridiculous number it is now.
There are no competitors to Facebook. (Anyone here on Friendster?)
There are no competitors to Instagram. And if there are, they will be dead soon. That is because in a networked world, there is more ‘value’ in being on the biggest user – you get more connections. So everyone ultimate gravitates to the ‘winner’. Yes, I know, Myspace still, sadly, exists. Anyone here on Myspace? Hands down. Yes.. you. Hand down.
In the Industrial Revolution, if you could get the capital together, you could open your shirt factory in Birmingham or Nottingham and sell your shirts to the local market. With the advent of the railways, you could expand your market – but there was still plenty of room to go around – plenty of markets for your shirts. Monopolies were rare.
They were so rare that they were outlawed, at least in the US, by anti-trust legislation.
But if you have a website, you don’t need a railroad to transport your ‘goods’ to your customers. You are already in 3 billion homes worldwide. Sell 3 billion shirts and you’re the Mark Zuckerberg of shirts. (And here, you don’t even have to make anything. What does Facebook sell but other people’s content! Here’s a plan. You make the shirts at home and I will sell them and take all the money. What a business!).
So yes, there are all these Internet billionaires popping up all over the place, not because they are such geniuses, but rather because they are the winners in the new Winner Take All game.
That’s the DNA of the Internet.
And it’s not just limited to search engines or photo sharing websites.
As more and more transactions take place online, there will be increased demand for the ‘winner’ in almost ever product line. In a world in which everyone can have whatever they want any time they want it (and often for no cost), who is going to settle for second best?
Hands down.
