The Future is coming at us at an alarming pace – faster than ever before and there’s no stopping it. So if you’re working in, or supplying these sort of industries – best you get #Trenovating.
The Post Office
Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there’s probably no way to sustain them long term. Email, Courier it and UPS etc. have just about wiped out the minimum revenue required to keep the post offices alive. Most of the mail we do receive is junk mail anyway.
The Cheque
Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with the cheque by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of Rands a year to process cheques. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the cheque. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.
The Newspaper
The younger generation simply does not read the newspaper. They certainly don’t subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.
The Book
You say you’ll never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages… We said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes – we wanted hold onto our collection of CD’s. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a
bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is a lot less than that of a real book. And think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of a book, you find
that you are lost in the story, can’t wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you’re holding a gadget instead of the real thing.
The Land Line Telephone
Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don’t need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they’ve always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. Some of the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell phone provider for no charge against your minutes.
Good Music
This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It’s the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is “catalogue items,” meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with or older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit.
Television Revenues
TV networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they’re playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. We say good riddance to most of it. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Pay TV.
The “Things” That You Own
Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in “the cloud”. Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest “cloud
services”. That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So,
Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That’s the good news.
Cursive Writing
Already gone in some
schools who no longer teach, “joined handwriting” because nearly everything is done now on computers or keyboards of some type (no pun intended)
Privacy
If there ever was a concept that we could look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. It’s been gone for a long time. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, “They” know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits and “They” will try to get you to buy something else.
