A New Year With Our Friends Electric
New Year’s Day!
Don’t you just love it?
Well, I’m here in Scotland. And there is nowhere better to enjoy the end of one year and the start of another. They call it Hogmanay up here, which translates into English as a great excuse for a gigantic party. North of the Border it is not just New Year’s Day that is a public holiday but January 2 as well. Yes, it’s that good a party.
Now this time of year is filled with Rs and Ps: resolutions and predictions.
For me, resolutions are not annual events, often to be forgotten as quickly as they are made. No, they are daily occurrences, weekly, monthly – in short, ongoing.
My one resolution, fixed to the wall of my office is to make more money next year than I did in the last one. If I didn’t have that resolution then I should not be in business. And, furthermore, you shouldn’t be reading this.
As to the predictions I have one about next year but before I reveal it I want to explain my thinking.
We live in the most technologically advanced age ever known to mankind. So has spoken every generation there has ever been that is until the next big leap forward. Remember what I said about that day in 2007 when the iPhone was unveiled? Up until that point, the world looked pretty smart that was until a Smart phone came along and pushed us all off into a whole new planet of digital capability. The rest, as they say, is history, or in this case on your Smart phone.
That said it always takes a few years for the general population to catch up with the technology on offer. Historically the magic number – the tipping point – is around 50 million. In the case of the iPhone, it didn’t take long. About 2 years and 9 months – that’s all from the original iPhone’s launch on June 29, 2007, to April 8, 2010. Today the iPhone has sold over 2 billion devices.
Compare that with the telephone. From its invention in the early 1870s, it took 75 years for the phone to reach 50 million users. Radio was invented in 1890s and took 38 years to hit the 50 million mark. Television took only 13 years from its first appearance in the 1930s.
Closer to our own time, the World Wide Web took only four years to amass 50 million users, and this was only because the infrastructure needed for the new technology wasn’t there. Once that infrastructure was in place, the numbers using the web grew to the point of mass saturation today.
But the speed of the web pales beside the platforms it has spawned.
Facebook took 2 years to reach 50 million users.
YouTube took 10 months.
Twitter a mere nine months.
Depressingly, Pornhub took 19 days.
What you can see from this is the speed of adoption of the new services available. This has moved from decades to years, from years to months, from months to days.
Why is this important to recognize?
Because each of the technologies mentioned and the business they stimulated was based on a prediction that once adopted a technology is hard to give up.
Surprisingly, although today fridges and washing machines are near universal, it was only in 1997 that dishwashers were in 50 per cent of all American homes. Even more surprisingly the British are yet to reach that figure.
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that once a technology is invented it can sit around for ages before – and this is the surprise – it is used for another purpose. Take, for example, the case of air conditioning. It was invented so as the humidity in factories would not affect paper products. It was as dull as that – a glorified fan for reams of paper. The thing was the workers at the factory started to take their lunch break in the part of the factory that was air-conditioned. It was then that someone thought about this just long enough to see the application of air conditioning elsewhere and so was born probably one of the defining moments in the story of America. And if you think that is an overstatement then consider how many “sunshine states” in the American south would have seen the transfer of populations since the Second World War from the cold north without the possibility of air conditioning in the blistering heat.
But never underestimate the customers’ basic laziness when it comes to new technology. I have a friend who works in media but only recently received his first Smart phone. He was not resistant to it just never got round to getting one. A few months later, he told me he is hooked and cannot see how his life could go back to an almost pre-digital age. But this is not the norm; research shows that even if you offer people an upgrade on their fibre broadband, for example, they still refuse it. If you think this just can’t be right then take the case of Compact Discs in Germany. CDs remained the most popular music format there until 2018. And, even more mind-boggling, still today nearly 75 per cent of German financial transactions are in cash.
So much for early adopters!
And, so to my prediction for 2020: electric cars.
Yes, that’s right. The electric car has been in the slow lane for a few years but next year I predict it will start to motor. Why? A number of factors: they are cheaper and easier to buy; the charge is getting not just easier to obtain with charging points sprouting up everywhere, but simply because a critical mass is – has – developed, and like the owners of dishwashers, anyone I’ve spoken to is not going back to petrol or diesel any time soon.
Coupled with the fact that it is getting harder and more expensive to use petrol or diesel vehicles due to official restrictions – some cites have begun to ban such vehicles – plus ongoing environmental concerns, then this really does appear to be a one-way street, and eventually one with only electric motors moving silently down it.
