THE RISK OF IMPLEMENTING A 2015 STRATEGY BY 2030
How will these forces manifest in traditional (aka “old economy”) companies? The historic differences between so-called high technology companies and the remaining product and service businesses that utilize the innovations that tech-focused developers provide is fading away. In one form or another, every company is becoming a technology developer which is forcing businesses to re-think how they approach growth.
B2B hardware, services and equipment players have been trying to re-create the “platform” and similar business models the tech sector has enabled in the B2C world for quite some time, but the track record has been abysmal. It’s logical to assume that B2B companies will eventually learn how to build platform business models and data-driven ecosystems that generate high-margin recurring-revenue businesses and create distinct competitive advantages.
However, with the changes occurring in the tech sector that we are describing here, the biggest risk traditional B2B players face is attempting to implement a 2015 “big tech” strategy just as the dominance of the tech sector is shifting and the “rules” of tech-driven growth strategy are dramatically changing. Honestly, it will likely take the rest of this decade for most traditional B2B players to implement a poor facsimile of a vintage 2015 big tech platform or SaaS or similar strategy.
Relatively few people really understand how dramatically technology-driven solution development is changing and how these changes will impact both old economy and tech sector businesses.
When telephones first came into existence, all calls were routed through switchboards and had to be connected by a live operator. It was long ago forecast that if telephone traffic continued to grow in this way, soon everybody in the world would have to be a switchboard operator. Of course, that has not happened, because automation was built into the systems to handle common tasks like connecting calls. We are quickly approaching analogous circumstances with the scale and diversity of application requirements users and customers want to address.
The emergence of low-code/no-code development tools and new generative AI development tools like ChatGPT underscores the significance of new automation tools for software development and how new app development capabilities combine with new deployment tools and cloud management technologies to force everyone in the industry to completely re-think software development.
These new tools represent a completely new approach to automating development and workflows – one where open-source software development tools and libraries are modular and interchangeable and where automation of software development and re-use of software components can be realized in a variety of flexible configurations.
Ultimately, all of this will drive a new software development model—including the fundamental notion that I need hundreds or thousands of over-priced “poets of code” working in my software business. Next-generation software tools will enable developers to build scalable software by allowing them to focus on business tasks, rather than worry about writing, piecing together, and maintaining fragmented code and building blocks. This will change the nature of the skills and capabilities businesses will require to development new solutions, change the recipes for hiring digital and tech talent as well as radically change the economics of developing digital offerings.