When we think of digital transformation, there's a tendency to think this is a new phenomenon, something in the last few years since it has started to impact business. But the fact of the matter is digital transformation in one form or another has been around for at least 50 plus years. Take for example the watch industry, Swiss watch makers for centuries were one of the leading makers of mechanized watches, experts at little gadgets and wheels to make those finely tuned instruments, and then along came digital watches in the late '60s. Japanese manufacturers such as Casio took over the market and the Swiss watch makers struggled in the wake of this new technology. Now, the good news in this story is that they reemerged in the 1980s emphasizing style and design leveraging the new technology. Consider another example, typewriters. For over a 100 years, typewriters were a dominant technology in offices throughout the world. Remington typewriter in particular was the market leader in many industries and in many markets having 80 percent market share for example in New York City. Then along came the IBM Selectric in 1962 and then Word processors in the 1970s. By the '80s and '90s Remington typewriter goes out of business. Interestingly, IBM was also a maker of typewriters, going back to their roots as a maker of business machines, they pivoted to computing and obviously were an early leader in personal computers. What about photographic images? Kodak was one of the world's best firms, a market leader in film production and then along comes digital and Kodak went bankrupt. Now, that seems like a simple story but interestingly Kodak saw this coming and actually as early as 1980 began investing in the digital transformation, yet they weren't able to make the transition. On the other side, we had a company like Nikon who also was a leader in cameras on the film side but saw the co-transition coming and it was able to make the transition by emphasizing their expertise in lens manufacturing. What about telecommunications? We saw the rise of cellular technology in the 1990s and this ushered in a quick rise and fall of a number of different companies like Motorola, Nokia, BlackBerry Palm, each vying for the evolution of this technology but it really wasn't until the iPhone came along that we had a true game changer that redefine the dominant design in the industry and lead to a competitive shaker. Let's take something else, bookstores. Bookstores historically tended to be local enterprises around the community, then came in the '60s and '70s larger companies who tried to roll up the market, companies like Borders and Barnes and Noble, and then we had obviously the Internet and online sales and Amazon raising triumphant and many of these companies going out of business such as Borders. Similar type of dynamic we saw in record stores here, independent record stores giving way to big-box stores like Circuit City. Then in the late 1990s we see the rise of first Napster and various types of digital files sharing, then digital distribution pioneered by iTunes, and then yet another disruption with streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. This has had an impact not only on record stores and retailers, but it has fundamentally changed the business model for musicians, producers, record labels, and it's also fundamentally impacted how we as consumers consume music, taking industry in which we might all listen to the popular songs on the radio to now each being able to get on-demand, the music we desire, whatever our specific tastes or niche that we feel. Similarly we've seen dynamics in the entertainment industry and specifically movie rentals where a company like Blockbuster was the leader in North America, movie rentals had 60,000 stores and their hype in 2004, fast came along Netflix with a DVD by mail business model, then came along streaming and on-demand, and the long and short of it Blockbuster now has gone bankrupt. It's interesting to note that while Blockbuster wasn't able to make this transition, Netflix actually made a significant transformation from being a DVD by mail business to be one of the leaders in streaming and online on-demand content. So there are some companies who are able to make these transitions. We can think more broadly about retailers, take Sears for example. Sears was the leading retailer for a good part of the 20th century in America. They had what was called the bible of retail, was their wholesale catalog business. Then came first Walmart who leverage information technology to innovate the supply chain, and of course later Amazon who really innovated across the whole customer experience around online retail. Sears is still in existence today but it's a shell of its former self. Take livery services, taxis, limos. Uber and Lyft have entered those markets and fundamentally transformed them. What's interesting to me about this story is they're leveraging mobile technology for sure but they're not necessarily changing the fundamental technology, you're still getting into a car and going from point A to point B. Using social media, they're able to redefine the experience for users and create new value and disrupt the market. Last but not least let's talk about automobiles. Automobiles have had a century of stability where internal combustion engines have been the dominant technology and we've had a fairly stable set of players who've been dominant within that industry, now it's being disrupted by electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles. We're seeing entry by companies like Tesla, Google, Uber. We're seeing transformation of companies like BMW and Volvo are being heavily invested in electric and autonomous vehicles. It's hard to say how this will play out but the interesting thing is we know a lot about in general how these types of disruptions play out over time. Let me just end by saying here that in the World Economic Forum of 2016, they called this type of digital transformation the Fourth Industrial Revolution. What we see is that the rise of new next-generation digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data robotics, they are all promising to perhaps accelerate digital transformation even more. Now, while this transformation promises to be an even more disruptive to existing business models and markets, this also creates an opportunity. Each disruption creates an opportunity for new business, for new markets, for new innovation, and those are available not only to upstarts a new entrance, but also for established businesses as well. Partly what we're going to do is think through how you as a business can survive and thrive in the face of these disruptions
