On technology revolution

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, on technology revolution:

“There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” Schmidt said, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing…People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.”

I’ve spent a lot of time with non-technical people lately.  People from different industries – shipping, real estates, and even music recording.  Most of these people are just getting into the whole technology thing.  Sure, they use Google to search the web.  But that’s not what I am talking about.  They are just getting started with using technology for their business.  And most of them are so far behind, that paper seems to them like the only working solution.

Talking to these people, there is a whole variety of subjects that have to be explained to them.  Even aside from technology.  Things like data consistency, workload scalability, process automation, backups, security, and more.  Consider for example a website.  Most of these people see a website with 5-10 pages to be an huge amount of work.  It’s almost like they need to hire a separate person to handle that.  For most of them, the fact that I have a personal blog with more than 4,000 articles in it, is mind-blowing.

When they are introduced to online tools for handling emails, documents, accounting, or project management, most of them need to pause for a couple of weeks, to process the information overload.  When they hear that blog posts and social media are more effective ways to communicate than press releases, they feel shaken, lost, and scared.  When they realize that most of the things they’ve learned in college are not too practical anymore, they get really stressed.

And these are people who are already familiar with Google search.  I know that there are layers and layers of people behind them, who have no knowledge of computers at all.  And those people will get online soon.  And they will need to change the way they think and the way they work.  And I have to agree with Eric Schmidt here, that most of those people are not ready yet.

But I think it will happen anyway.