I'll be the first to admit: Although I love to concoct metaphors and analogies to make my point, they don't always work. Sometimes they're awkward or cumbersome, and I wish I had approached a topic differently. But creativity is fun, even if things don't always pan out.
So here I go again...
As a nostalgic, aging Baby Boomer, I love to reminisce. Let's start out by traveling back in time to 1998. Apple Computer, then on the critical list after several disastrous years, began its long and impressive march to dominance by rolling out its iMac series. At the time, desktop computers dominated, and many of them shared the bland, beige, squared off looks that caused people to refer to them as "boat anchors."
Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, Dell, et al, were the most common brand names of a boring, unimaginative group. But the iMac shattered the pathetic paradigm. How so? Because the iMacs were rounded off and came in funky colors with funky names: lime, strawberry, blueberry, tangerine and grape. They were actually stylish and broke the mold. It was cool to have one on your desktop, whether at work or home. (Being a longtime Mac user, I happen to think the brand's operating system and user interface are superior to PCs, and that also had a lot to do with iMacs' popularity.)
But here's what stood out for me: There was no floppy disc port in the iMac. Only a slot for CDs and DVDs. It was as if a manufacturer of automobile stereo systems decided, in 1980, to totally eliminate cassette players and instead include capability for playing CDs. (Okay, this is not totally accurate, since CD's didn't come on the scene until 1983, but you get the point). The cassette stuck around for many years after CD's arrived, but the floppy disc died a quick death once CDs and DVDs arrived -- largely because its storage capacity was minuscule. Yet for perhaps 5 or 6 years after the first iMacs came out, the beige boat anchors still came with floppy disc ports. Can you say "clueless"?
In recent years, I've seen plenty of other "skip ahead" moves by companies, artists and organizations that have their finger on the future pulse.
The nation's largest grocery store chain, Kroger, owns its own food processing plants and dairies, as well as several other major supermarket chains including Harris-Teeter, Food Lion, and Farm Fresh, as well as department and jewelry stores. Recently I read that Kroger is making inroads into Florida, but not in traditional brick-and-mortar sense. Publix was founded in Florida and dominates the state, so perhaps Kroger is wise not to compete on Publix' terms.
Instead, Kroger is taking a page from the Amazon playbook. It is opening massive fulfillment centers with advanced robotics for sorting, storing, selecting and grouping products. Delivery by small trucks (think Amazon Prime) will be the M.O. At least in the Sunshine State, Kroger will focus on home delivery of groceries to people who order them online. That seems to be the growing trend. While Kroger and Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Meijer (among many others) have offered a service for several years in which their employees grab your ordered goods off the shelves, bag them and load them into your vehicle at the stores, the pandemic accelerated the home delivery model.
In the music industry, CDs are still around, but greatly diminished. The old paradigm, from vinyl to cassettes and 8-tracks through CDs, was for artists to record albums consisting of anywhere from six to 16 or even 20 songs for a double album. Enthusiasts of groups and singers would willingly buy these package deals just as we accept cable and satellite TV companies bundling together channel packages. If you were lucky, you loved every song (or almost every song) on the album. But too often, there were duds you could do without.
But with mp3 so dominant for at least the past decade, many artists simply bypass putting their music on physical, tangible objects and instead sell digital versions over Apple's iTunes, Amazon Music, Google, and many smaller sites. Gone are many of the large record or CD collections -- replaced by smart phones full of music apps and mp3 files. (Some folks, including yours truly, pay for cloud storage because we've already exceeded our smart phone's storage capacity.)
Turning to talk radio, one of my all-time favorites, the irascible and irrepressible Michael Savage, recently ended his longtime radio contract and now does exclusively podcasts. He claims it is because the corporate suits were getting insufferable and he could no longer be himself under their yoke, and maybe he's right. But then, he is getting on in years, and a five-day a week program (scaled down to three days a week in his final few radio years) is a bit much.
I believe more and more talk radio folk -- especially those who are not in the same league as Hannity and Mark Levin, will end up doing podcasts and bypass the radio paradigm. Who wants to put up with so many commercials and be restricted to a certain time frame and day of the week? Many podcasts are free, and listeners have the option of speeding up the talking to 1 1/2 or even 2 times if they can't spare 2 or 3 hours of listening time, and to skip commercials as well.
I've been a big satellite radio fan for many years, and am aware that millions also prefer streaming music such as Spotify and Pandora. Sometimes I wonder whether broadcast radio is in serious jeopardy.
We'll be seeing a lot more of these paradigm changes soon -- for transportation, work, healthcare, insurance and many other areas. The change is coming so fast, there are bound to be a few albatrosses like the late Blockbuster, cluelessly trying to pedal DVDs when the world was moving rapidly toward streaming video.
Companies and organizations that don't want to be left in the dust had best put some futurists on their payrolls.
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