Business Transformations
Tuesday: July 24, 2007 6:28 AM
There are many examples of organizations that have been completely transformed themselves over the past few years; none as much as the photography industry. Just about every component of the ecosystem has been transformed or been reinvented. Not only has the technology changed but our behavior and habits have been transformed. Take the camera; once you loaded film inside and could take 20 pictures in hopes for a good one. Now, you can take hundreds of pictures and simply delete the ones your four year old took. When you were done, you jumped into the family sedan and headed to CVS. One hour later, you had your photos in hand. Don’t forget to get extra copies since Aunt Mary wants to see them as well. Today, you can upload them with your digital camera software where you can get the red out without Visine. Then, once you are happy with everything, you can upload to Flickr to share will your family and millions of people you don’t know. With the tagging capabilities of Web 2.0, these people can share their images of similar topics.
Still need to print them out, then your laser printer can do almost as good as CVS from a print quality point of view. Oh, Target will print them straight from Flickr if you don’t have one of those printers. One final transformation to add is the photo album; Scrap booking is all the craze with moms. Tupperware is out and scrap booking parties are in. What use to be an area for experts can now be done by anyone with a digital camera. We are all now expert photographers and those that make a living in this field better learn to add those services since the product is gone.
The point of the entry is that Web 2.0 technologies can be integrated into the business eco-system and will be. “The stupid, loyal, humble customer, employee and shareholder is dead” (See FunkyBusiness.com by Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale). The customer is now in complete control, not of your business, but the entire eco-system that it resides in. The impact of this as yet to be felt, but soon will be.
There are many examples of organizations that have been completely transformed themselves over the past few years; none as much as the photography industry. Just about every component of the ecosystem has been transformed or been reinvented. Not only has the technology changed but our behavior and habits have been transformed. Take the camera; once you loaded film inside and could take 20 pictures in hopes for a good one. Now, you can take hundreds of pictures and simply delete the ones your four year old took. When you were done, you jumped into the family sedan and headed to CVS. One hour later, you had your photos in hand. Don’t forget to get extra copies since Aunt Mary wants to see them as well. Today, you can upload them with your digital camera software where you can get the red out without Visine. Then, once you are happy with everything, you can upload to Flickr to share will your family and millions of people you don’t know. With the tagging capabilities of Web 2.0, these people can share their images of similar topics.
Still need to print them out, then your laser printer can do almost as good as CVS from a print quality point of view. Oh, Target will print them straight from Flickr if you don’t have one of those printers. One final transformation to add is the photo album; Scrap booking is all the craze with moms. Tupperware is out and scrap booking parties are in. What use to be an area for experts can now be done by anyone with a digital camera. We are all now expert photographers and those that make a living in this field better learn to add those services since the product is gone.
The point of the entry is that Web 2.0 technologies can be integrated into the business eco-system and will be. “The stupid, loyal, humble customer, employee and shareholder is dead” (See FunkyBusiness.com by Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale). The customer is now in complete control, not of your business, but the entire eco-system that it resides in. The impact of this as yet to be felt, but soon will be.
