Future belongs to the fearless as change speeds up
Last month SA’s most historic post office closed down. The Stellenbosch mail coach began operating 212 years ago as the first regular service between that village and Cape Town, and the iconic poskantoor was built in 1935.
But it was doomed by a technological revolution that began just 25 years ago.
“It illustrates how big the shift was from when the internet started until now,” says Dave Meintjies, CEO of communications service provider Connection Telecom, and a pioneer in the local internet industry. “Every letter then was via posted mail; now it’s almost all e-mail.
“When the first connections arrived, it cost a business between R17,000 and R25,000 a month for a dedicated 64Kbit/s international line. Now we can buy a 1Gbit/s dedicated fibre line from Seacom for R17,000. That’s 16,000 times more capacity for the same price.”
In the mid-1990s, Meintjies was CEO of UUNET SA, one of the first commercial internet service providers in South Africa.
In 2003 he founded Connection Telecom with Steve Davies, technical director of Internet Africa as far back as 1993, and Rob Lith, general manager at the same company.
Between them, they have seen every internet fad come and go, but there is one constant, says Meintjies.
“Everyone’s lines keep getting faster, and business keeps getting faster, so companies have to keep acting faster.
“For example, the TV broadcast model is dying, and streaming is the future. The Yellow Pages is history, and no one struggles to find contact details for a supplier any more.”
Davies points to rapidly growing consumer services like Takealot in e-commerce and Afrihost in internet connectivity, both of which have automated every element of their businesses.
“They consider it a process failure if they have to talk to customers. The whole customer journey is now electronic, and that means it’s fast.”
That encapsulates some of the shifts of the past 25 years. The next 25 will see the very creation of businesses transformed, says Davies.
“The experience for a technologist who built customer-facing systems is already so different, as we can now ride on the back of amazing resources available in the cloud from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. From auto-transcription of audio to inquiries triggering artificial intelligence responses, you can just reach out and use these things.
“There is a lot of fear of this future in businesses, but if the chief digital officer embraces business goals, the company will overcome the fear. If they don’t, someone will do a better job.
“It will also probably be the end of
9-to-5 jobs. You will find people more independent, less likely to be employed fulltime, but in a day may do three or four jobs that don’t conflict. All of us will have our own digital footprints, and will access the internet from wherever we are. You won’t need a handset, only voice authentication. We’re still going to talk, still going to write; we’ll just do it in different ways.”
In this near future, it is clear, we will no longer build a business from the ground up, but download it from the cloud.
The internet has transformed business in 25 years, but that was just the start
Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter @art2gee