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Monday, May 3, 2010

Growing Dependencies/ Growing Risks/ Growing Opportunities.

Growing Dependencies/ Growing Risks/ Growing Opportunities.

From THE GLOBAL FUTURIST (http://TheGlobalFuturist.blogspot.com) in conjunction with The National Networker Companies at http://www.TheNationalNetworker.com with all rights reserved.

Dear Friends and Fellow Futurists:

I won't waste time debating about whether or not the US is actually in an economic recovery, or about whether or not Europe (particularly Portugal, Geece and some of the Mediterranean countries) is falling further into one -- at this point, these things are issues of semantics, propaganda and wild conjecture. I believe that an economic recovery involves 1) employment and jobs creation; 2) an increase in the use of existing industrial capacity; 3) an internationally highly-regarded sovereign credit rating; 4) an increase in the median amount of disposable personal income, and; 5) an increase in the median rate of savings. In the words of great American Statesman, Meritorious Philosopher and Student of Humanity (Forrest Gump), "and that's all I have to say about that." 

I won't discuss energy alternatives, offshore drilling, a "greener" lifestyle, iPads, corporate corruption or cloud computing. I just wanted to focus on dependencies; in particular, I wanted to discuss communications, formatting dependencies, server dependenciesdata storage, list management services, button and blog platform dependencies and data manipulation and management ("M and M").

Many large corporations, government agencies (even the national defense systems of a number of countries) have become totally dependent upon these independent (and often free or minimally-priced) media services such as Google, Blogger, Feedburner, Twitter, FaceBook, Skype, CitrixYouTube, and a number of others. While companies and governments are enjoying all of these wonderful utilities, they have 1) become totally dependent upon each of them as a soul-source provider, and they have also 2) given them unrestricted access to mailing lists, trade secrets, and other valuable proprietary information.

As a Global Futurist, my contention is that enterprises have given over substantially all of their power, information and access to the service providers. This is colossal exposure.

If one of these providers started charging exhorbitant rates for what used to be a free service, what are the users to do? If one of these providers decides to sell or otherwise use your information for nefarious purposes (unsolicited advertising, list brokering, data mining, et. cetera) what are your practical defenses? If one of these service providers had a glitch and eradicated all of your crucial information (quite by accident), what would you do? If one of these service providers just decided to go out of business, what would you do? By analogy, think of rising oil and gasoline prices, the wholesale failure of our trusted financial instituions (as well as their capricious volatility and the devastating effect which they have had on the economy).

Growing dependencies become growing risks. While they are in large part unavoidable, they can be mitigated with means of independently backing up data, applications, mailing lists and other information and formats.

Expect to hear al gret deal during the next three years about these large providers acting like bully monopolists. Their shares will tend to do relatively well in the eqiuties markets (as they are always in the news and are, by their nature, self-promoting), but they will perceived as increasingly menacing bullies.

Free services are not permanently free. They are free during their beta-testing phases, while they are achieving great user growth and volume, and while they can afford to be. Bit invariably, investors want to see a return on their capital invested. When this happens, the end-users will have already become a captive audience (rather like prisoners), will be unable to assemble enough power and influence to push these newly-monetizing into sensibility and compassion.

Expect to also hear about the emergence of fail-safe various data and format back-up services -- principly, new enterprises coming into being to protect the end-users from the threat of business devastation at the hands of these utilities as the warnings about outages (remember Enron in California?), increased charges and increasing demands upon users grow, as these once geek-driven friendly utilities start wanting to pay their venture capital providers back. The increase in conglomeration and consolidation of these computer utilities titans will make the threat increasingly more serious, adding an element of opportunism and initiative to the end-user population.

You might consider either 1) starting up a company that specializes in backup solutions; 2) investing in a company which is developing (as a DSE - developmental stage enterprise) these solutions; 3) being prepared by keeping a Futuristic eye on the companies, and engaging with them. You'll likely consider becoming a client.

In this case, I request that you begin backing up your data, presentation formats and and all of your information, as well as all of your proprietary and precious systems.

Trite, but appropriate:

Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

p.s. If you've not already done so, please join us (at no cost) as a Member of The National Networker Companies -- join us today at: http://bit.ly/JoinTNNWC 

NOTE: Information on some of my other blogs and media sites follows below this line of text. Please feel free to explore my blogs and other media. You might even take a gander (or a gosling, or perhaps a furtive glance) at Adam J. Kovitz' s personal blog, which can be found at http://adamjkovitz.blogspot.com/.


About Douglas Castle 
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