New Normal, The Great Opportunities In A Time Of Great Risks

.1. TECHNOLOGY: IT?S ABOUT YOU Finally, after decades when most technological innovations were directed at the needs of corporations, the cool stuff is aimed at us. That's right, in the New Normal, consumers are the beneficiary of the most dramatic technological advances. Don't believe me? Just check out the displays wherever computers are sold. When a store wants to show off the best PCs, it doesn't run a business application; it demonstrates consumer products, such as interactive entertainment or video editing. Today, the hottest PC hardware isn't in enterprises, it's in homes. It's not just the world of personal computers that is now ruled by the rest of us. The consumer technology revolution is happening everywhere. And it's just hitting its stride. We live in an era of uncertainty, but here's something on which you can rely: consumer technology will get better and better and better. Now it's you who are being empowered, and just as we've seen with businesses, the benefits will go to those who take advantage of emerging technology.As hard as it may be to believe, businesses are now getting derivative benefits from products designed for consumers. Businesses are also figuring out how to leverage consumer products to improve business processes. Instant Messaging (IM), which started out as a consumer application, has improved the productivity of millions of people in businesses across the country. Soon, automobile insurers will be able to streamline the claims-adjustment process by having customers photograph fender damage from their cell-phone cameras and transmit the evidence in real time. This shift in the center of gravity of the tech industry began at the dawn of the new millennium. When businesses upgraded their technology in anticipation of Y2K, they replaced every system they had with the latest and greatest. And then came the recession. Corporate buyers of technology basically took three years off. During that hiatus, the technology industry had nothing better to do than cater to the consumer. Remarkably, the downturn in consumer spending that many economists expected never materialized. What happened instead was a flood of compelling new products?DVD players, digital cameras, and iPods'that kept consumers in a spending mode right through the recession. It's not as if every product did great, but enough of them did. Consumer purchases of PCs were nothing special, but demand for flat-panel TVs went bananas. The combination of rapidly improving price performance and inexpensive manufacturing is delivering a dazzling array of easy-to-use products at prices below the spending limits of the mass market. If you wanted to buy a consumer PC fifteen years ago, the cost was so high that it required you to postpone other major expenditures. At $500 a pop today, PCs are affordable to just about every consumer in America. But the exciting stories relate to products you can carry: phones, cameras, music players, and the like. These products reflect a valuable lesson that consumers have taught technology companies: products that do one thing really well usually succeed. In the days when new consumer devices were expensive to produce, vendors tended to load them down with features to justify a high price. The trouble was, on multi- purpose gadgets, many of the functions worked poorly, if at all. Consumers quickly became too savvy to fall for that. Vendors have gotten smarter, too. When they bring a new product to market, vendors are more often starting with a single-function device. That keeps the price down and increases the probability of a good consumer experience. Take the Roomba, the battery- operated robotic vacuum cleaner that sells for $199 and actually works. You put it in a room and walk away. Roomba does its job'more quietly than traditional vacuum cleaners'and then goes to sleep. If the Roomba had arrived on the scene in the late 1990McNamee, Roger is the author of 'New Normal, The Great Opportunities In A Time Of Great Risks', published 2004 under ISBN 9781591840596 and ISBN 1591840597.