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Two quick ideas to ponder…

Jaithirth “Jerry” Rao:

“We must be honest about it. We are in the middle of a big technological change, and when you live in a society that is at the cutting edge of that change [like America], it is hard to predict. It’s easy to predict for someone living in India.

In ten years we are going to be doing a lot of the stuff that is being done in America today. We can predict our future. But we are behind you. You are defining the future. America is always on the edge of the next creative wave…So it is difficult to look into the eyes of that accountant and say this is what is going to be. We should not trivialize that. We must deal with it and talk about it honestly…

Any activity where we can digitize and decompose the value chain, and move the work around, will get moved around. Some people will say, ‘Yes, but you can’t serve me a steak.’ True, but I can take the reservation for your table sitting anywhere in the world, if the restaurant does not have an operator. We can say, ‘Yes, Mr. Friedman, we can give you a table by the window.’

In other words, there are parts of the whole dining-out experience that we can decompose and outsource. If you go back and read the basic economics textbooks, they will tell you: Goods are traded, but services are consumed and produced in the same place. And you cannot export a haircut. But we are coming close to exporting a haircut, the appointment part. What kind of haircut do you want? Which barber do you want? All those things can and will be done by a call center far away.” (1)

Here’s another gem from an interview by CNET’s Paul Sloane, he interviewed venture capitalist Mark Andreessen on his predictions in 2012:

“From where he stands, as the guy who co-founded Netscape Communications and now co-runs the powerful Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, no industry is safe from software. Or, as Andreessen put it in a much-discussed piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, “Software is eating the world.”

Software has chewed up music and publishing. It’s eaten away at Madison Avenue. It’s swallowed up retail outlets like Tower Records. The list goes on.

No area is safe–and that’s why Andreessen sees so much opportunity.

Fueling his optimism: ubiquitous broadband, cloud computing, and, above all, the smartphone revolution. In the 1990s, the Internet led to crazy predictions that simply weren’t yet possible. Now they are.”

The first decade of the 21st century only touched the surface of how technology will eventual shape our society and culture. Hopefully on pluURL can bring some interesting insight on how technology might impact the road ahead.

(1)Friedman, Thomas L. (2007-07-24). The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (p. 12). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.