ANYWHERE

How GLOBAL CONNECTIVITY Is Revolutionizing the Way We Do BusinessBy EMILY NAGLE GREEN

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Yankee Group Research, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-163514-1

Contents

Chapter One

The ANYWHERE Revolution

“The Internet gave us time freedom, then freedom of choice. Now it’s giving us ‘where’ freedom.”

—Hilmi Ozguc, founder, Maven Networks

Quick quiz: What impact has technology had on your life in the past five or ten years? The chances are good, no matter who you are, what you do, or where you live, that you’ll say that there have been some profound changes to how you live and work. Here are just three technologies that I can probably guarantee you have personal experience with: the Internet, the cell phone, and the digital camera. Each one has been a game-changer, transforming what we do, how we do it, and when and where we do it.

The technologies at the core of these examples—a common digital network, wireless data transmission, and a standard digital representation for pictures—have not only changed us as people, but they have reshaped the business landscape for those activities and across those industries. Think about it: Online commerce redefined shopping forever, putting some retailers out of business and forcing the survivors to change. Cell phones have expanded from being used in our cars to every place we go, including inside our own homes, because many of us have decided we don’t need a home phone line anymore. And digital cameras—when was the last time you saw a picture-developer kiosk in a mall parking lot? Polaroid went out of business, and Kodak is a dramatically different company from what it was 10 years ago. Billions of dollars of economic change have been set in motion from just these three developments. So yes, technology has brought big changes to us in the past decade.

Across the developed world in North and South America, Europe, and many parts of Asia and the Pacific Rim countries, the vast majority of us use one or more of these three technologies on a daily basis. And in emerging markets, the advance of technology has been very different but no less dynamic. Even though many parts of the world haven’t yet tasted all the technology breakthroughs of the past decade, they’ve been experiencing breakthroughs nonetheless. Cell phones have taken off like a rocket in markets that have lacked the most basic telephone infrastructure. Indian medical experts examine digital X- rays e-mailed to them overnight to speed diagnosis and reduce health-care costs. Pirated digital copies of movies and music show up in the most remote parts of the world.

Here’s the second part of our quick quiz: There’s a common thread among these three technology examples. What one trait do these particular breakthroughs have in common with each other?

The answer is connectivity.

Each of these changes enhances our ability to connect with others. A digital connection is an element of each device’s value proposition to us: the Internet’s global collection of information resources, the cell phone’s ability to take our calls and messages while we’re on the go, and the digital camera’s ease of reuse and retransmission of our images.

These developments, along with all of us, are just a few of the actors in a grand connectivity story playing out around the world. They are bringing us closer to a future of global connectivity, when all people, and all the things we care about, will be connected to each other on a vast digital network. In fact, the word “global” doesn’t do this justice, since it fails to clarify the extent of the expansion not just to more places and more people but to more things as well. The right word is actually “ubiquitous.”

What is happening, precisely? Simply put, a convergence in the advances of communications technology, the powerful economics of large scale, and our fundamental human appetites are coming together to accelerate the expansion of connectivity in our lives.

“I know already,” you may be saying. “I’m plugged in, I’m connected.” Probably true: many of us are attached to iPods, use Wi-Fi from the road, and nag our children to stop texting long enough to eat a decent breakfast. We have a reasonable chance of finding cell phone reception wherever we go. And we’re getting bombarded with commercial messages of all kinds about connectivity: Change your mobile phone plan! Get your TV entertainment from your phone company instead of your cable company! Save travel expenses at work and do a videoconference!

And certainly the Internet’s emergence has changed our world: We order things online. Many of us buy movies and TV episodes on iTunes or other popular Web sites. Many of us are also changing the way we get news and reading material by signing up for e-mail alerts, checking online news sites, and, most recently, using digital reading devices, or e- books, to download and read books, newspapers, and magazines. Some of us can even access the Internet on game consoles hooked to the TV.

That said, our connected experiences are uneven and mishmashed. We can access the Internet on our phones, but we can’t easily edit our documents on them. We can download books, music, and videos to portable devices, but we can’t readily access content other than the specific media targeted for each individual device. We use multiple devices (laptops, cell phones, TVs, iPods, e-book readers), but many of them don’t connect easily with one another, causing our drawers to fill up with mysterious black cables and plugs whose purposes we quickly forget. We’re straitjacketed by existing technology formats and investments, laws about intellectual property rights, and simple convention. Our emerging world of connectivity is without order—or is it an excess of order?

The truth is that we’ve just begun a journey that will take us to a future very different from today’s sometimes rewarding, sometimes bewildering connectivity experiences.

This expansion of connectivity that we’ve witnessed, bringing us all three of these successful new technologies and many others, is a work in progress, building on both the successes and failures of recent connectivity offerings as well as breakthroughs in technology and price that still lie ahead.

It’s been sparked by a potent trio of forces—a common digital network, the availability of broadband capacity, and the powerful economics of wireless transmission. (See Figure 1.1.)

These elements have already begun to create explosive change for all of us, even as they combine in new ways to change us even more. Here are a few global connectivity developments already on the horizon:

• More connected devices: Vitality, Inc. has developed a pill bottle with the capacity to notify the network when it’s been opened or closed. Today, only about half of patients who have been prescribed a daily pill actually manage to stick to the regimen. The rest forget to take their prescribed dosage at least some of the time. For common conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes, lack of complete adherence to medication means that patients don’t get the care they need, and health-care costs, already high, spiral even higher. Data gathered on pill consumption with the help of the container itself can help family members and medical personnel increase patient compliance with the prescription, thus improving health while reducing the expense of monitoring the activity.

• More connected experiences: The growing role of connectivity in our day-to- day experiences is sometimes as invisible as the radio waves that enable them. Vending machines in Japan, a very popular method of selling everything from sandwiches to dress shirts, are beginning to report on their inventory over a wireless telephone network, thus saving their operators wasted trips through traffic when the machines don’t need to be replenished but ensuring that they do send a truck when the product is running low. In multiple markets including South Korea, products can be paid for at the point of purchase by passing a mobile phone in front of a wireless reader; in the Netherlands and elsewhere, parking meters have been replaced with signs indicating the process for paying for the spot by texting from the driver’s mobile phone.

• More connected businesses: Connectivity expansion is touching much more than consumer devices and activities; businesses are at the forefront of a tremendous explosion in connectivity-enabled assets and processes. Airports in Hong Kong and Malaysia put wireless transmitters on airplane catering trolleys so that they can be rapidly and automatically routed through a stripping and reloading center to put the correct food on each unit and send it back out to the right flight. Heathrow Airport has begun to incorporate wireless transmitters on taxis to reduce queuing time for both passengers and taxis.

This connectivity expansion is unstoppable. In the next 10 years, the world’s people and things will be transformed by a steady expansion in connectivity among them.

The total impact of the changes being brought about by these communications breakthroughs is magnificent in scope, and we’ve truly witnessed only the beginning. This remarkable set of developments will change who you are as a person and what your company should be doing to reach your customers, workers, partners, and assets.

And that’s what this book is about: the changes still ahead in connectivity. They will bring us the largest technology change in our lifetimes. No one and no company will be spared as it revolutionizes how we do business. And businesses that see what’s coming and know what to do about it will have a tremendous opportunity to profit from the change.

Where (or What) Is Anywhere?

Even though “ubiquitous” is the most appropriate adjective to describe the steady progress of global connectivity to a completely pervasive state, and I’ll continue to use it here and there as we talk about the increasing expansion of communications around us, I have a much simpler way to talk about this world we’re headed to: Anywhere.

That’s my name for this future state: when all people, and all the things we care about, will be connected.

Why do I call it that? Because at its very core, this transformation in connectivity is about the emergence of a global network, bringing a major shift in the relevance of place in our lives. This transformation is changing the meaning of location in two dimensions. First, location—where we are or where other people and things are—will become less significant to our activities and decisions, thereby reducing constraints on what we do or how we do it. Want to reconnect with old friends halfway around the world? The Internet has already helped us find more ex-boyfriends and girlfriends and former classmates than we imagined possible. Can’t get a flight from Tokyo, or don’t want to move from rural France? Don’t worry—you can still do work for the London office using the global network. Left some information at home? Never mind; storing your personal files in the network means you can get to them from wherever you are.

But simultaneously, in a thrilling contradiction, it will also expand the significance of place. The fizz in our Anywhere brew is wireless connectivity, cutting the cords in our lives. Our ability to use nothing more than airwaves to economically deliver connectivity to locations not reached by fixed wires—jungles, deserts, trains, oceanliners— means that the network can finally go everywhere it can be useful. People in what have been considered the most remote parts of the world will be reachable, some for the very first time. And as the Anywhere Network® links businesses to all locations, business executives who previously only needed to think about the markets of London, New York, and Tokyo will have to become familiar with the needs, cultures, airports, and cuisines of Mumbai, Dubai, and Dakar.

Location will thus both matter to us less, and more, than it ever has.

Not only will Anywhere be bigger than other technology transformations we’ve lived through before, it will also be faster. Mobile phones reached their first billion users faster than any other technology introduction in history. In 2007, there were 2.8 billion mobile devices in use globally. That total has been growing since then by approximately 1.6 million new mobile phones every day and shows little signs of stopping. (See Figure 1.2.)

The falling cost of access to the growing global network, the financial opportunity that the network’s expansion is creating for firms highly motivated to benefit, and the economic power that network access puts in the hands of its users all conspire to make the move to Anywhere something like a brushfire—racing into green fields at a tremendous clip.

How Big Is Anywhere?

When most people think about connectivity, the Internet and mobile phone technology are what leap to mind. But as connectivity comes to more things around us, its contribution in our lives will expand well beyond our understanding of today’s PC-based Internet and mobile phone capabilities. In the next few years, we will see an explosion of other connected devices as well. Already, we can upload photographs to the Internet without using a PC by using a Wi-Fi-enabled camera. And we can download books directly to electronic devices that store multiple titles digitally and display them page by page, subject to the reader’s control.

The emergence of Anywhere is also going to affect what types of connections we have to the Internet and to each other. The network behind Anywhere will let us access data—software applications and all manner of information—”in the cloud.” You’ll no longer need to be at your computer to get your personal digital files or to reach your customers. All you’ll need is a network connection and some connectivity device.

But this change will challenge old ideas and ways. Our connectivity experiences today are dominated by the influence of the prior communication technologies such as newspapers, television, and traditional telephone lines. Our perceptions are largely controlled, whether we realize it or not, by the inherent limitations of these older technologies.

As we move to a common global network, Anywhere will reshape us as consumers; it will change how businesses work; and it will also remake the business landscape, pitting massive multinational firms against each other in pitched battles to deliver the Anywhere experience we’ll seek. Some of those firms will not survive the fight. Many new firms will emerge that pinpoint new needs stemming from our insatiable appetite to take our experiences with us wherever we go. And Anywhere will be the source of major societal change, redrawing personal relationships and norms of behavior. If that’s not enough for you, political and legal landscapes will shift as well, engendering new regulation and legislation that try to support and control our activities on this pervasive digital network fabric.

I made a big claim about Anywhere earlier: that it will be the largest and most profound technology transformation of our lifetime. To make sure it’s clear why we can say this, let’s consider the last major technology revolution in our lifetime—the commercialization of the Internet—and see how Anywhere will compare.

Starting from the launch of the Netscape browser in 1995, the following 10-year period witnessed the growing interconnection of about 500 million PCs in the world, based in a workplace, a school, or in someone’s home. For most of that period and for most people, the actual physical network connection was through the existing telephone network, using dial-up modems and phone lines to transfer bits, ever so slowly, among computers on the network. As slow and as frustrating an experience as that feels for most of us now, depending as we do on much higher-speed connections, that bit-by-bit drip of a brand- new link to the larger digital world brought about 1 billion people online. The financial value creation—the sales of computers and network services, plus the launch of brand-new commercial activities and entities dependent on the network—ran to billions of dollars worldwide by 2005.

Anywhere—the inevitable expansion of digital connectivity to all of us and the things we care about—will beat out the Internet and any other technology experience we’ve yet lived through. Its impact will dwarf those changes just in any single dimension alone. In the aggregate, it will produce a stunning total change that will be greater than the sum of those dimensions. (See Figure 1.3.)

For starters, the places connected by the network will not just be work, school, and home—and not just in the parts of the world that have been able to afford the costs of the telephone network. Instead, the network will reach into the farthest corners of the world, making the lack of connectivity a luxury rather than proof of irrelevance.

The devices brought to the global network through this expansion will not just be computers and phones, but cameras and picture frames, cars and crates, pumps and pill bottles: literally anything that can benefit from being able to exchange information of any kind with any other item or person in the world.

The people connected to the global network will be all of us—over 5 billion by 2015 just by virtue of the expected expansion in mobile phones alone. When people can send and receive voice, text, and other digital services, they’ve joined the global network at the center of the Anywhere era. And it’s not just affecting people in the developed world. After many years of marginal access to communications technology, or none at all, emerging markets such as India and parts of Africa are finally getting connected too.

Finally, the value creation—the financial contributions to the global economy, creating revenue, jobs, and profit—will be in the trillions of dollars by the time the Anywhere Network has expanded around the world and has the capacity and intelligence to support an explosion of new services that will take advantage of it.

So yes: This progression toward Anywhere is big. The path to Anywhere will be a complex and sometimes bewildering drama with some exciting twists and turns ahead. In fact, not only is this going to be a dramatic set of events, I’ll go yet another step and call it a revolution— the Anywhere Revolution.

Like other revolutions before it, battles will be waged that will have a significant impact on the ultimate state of affairs, and those outcomes will not be universally welcomed by all. And in the global landscape across which these developments play out, they will leave permanent scars and new landmarks.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from ANYWHEREby EMILY NAGLE GREEN Copyright © 2010 by Yankee Group Research, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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