You’ve been hearing it so often lately its almost become a cliché now – The new era is that of the knowledge worker. Its now an employee’s market rather than the employer’s market, where the internal customer is gaining as much importance as the external customer. The external customer on the other hand, is becoming far more demanding and wants more options than ever while deciding what to buy and whom to buy from”.
However, there is another revolution taking place, slow, silent and deadly. A change in paradigm that threatens to prove all the management theory thus far, to be redundant in the times to come. I like to call it the “i-share” revolution.
New words are popping up in the consumer’s dictionary today – orkut, torrents, ebooks, youtube, esnips, forums, blogs. It is appropriate to call this the knowledge era. What one generally omits to add is that this is fast becoming the knowledge-sharing era, the information sharing era and thus, the i-share era. Consumers no longer want to pay for more than half the services and products companies are willing to provide. There is nothing more appealing than a freebie, now more so than ever, and torrents, youtube etc provide just that. New lines are being drawn, and new rules are being written. Lesser people are going to the halls to watch movies today, they rather prefer to watch them on their desktops/laptops. And multiplexes seem to be adding towards their own misery. They have raised ticket prices to such an extent that hardly anybody feels that the cinematic experience is really worth it anymore.
A revolution took place, a few decades ago, with Netscape and the concept of open sourcing. Well, open sourcing is now back in a whole new avatar – the freebie. You just have to log on to the internet to see the wealth of information, software, movies, games etc you can get for free!! People are willing to just share what they have without expecting anything in return and this mentality has spread across the globe resulting in the i-share revolution.
Companies, for their part, are now going to be in a real jam. With this revolution it is going to be very difficult to come up with products that customers would be willing to pay for. Hardware would still sell, no issues there ( though the success of ebay etc may change that trend soon too) but those that sell internet products, they have got to come up with some good ideas, and fast otherwise this information revolution is going to gobble them up. The only reason it hasn’t already is because of the lack of awareness of these media. People still use the internet for only emails and browsing and so have no idea about the power at their disposal. Moreover, connectivity is an issue too, and most people do not have access to fast network connections. However, once all that changes and people know about these media, then there is going to be no refuge. And this may happen sooner than you think, what with talks of people getting enabled and more and more people getting connected everyday.
It is no good saying that this stuff is illegal and that would prevent its proliferation cause it won’t. For what its worth, make strict rules regarding use of these media, and you’ll watch their popularity soar even higher. I have been wracking my brains for the past one week, thinking of how companies can counter this new threat, but have failed to come up with any answers. In my view, the paradigm has changed already, the i-share revolution is here for good, and though this is a boon to the consumer, it may spell doom to the providers.
