Fusion 2024 Looking Back at the Next Ten Years
Peter Coffee VP for Strategic Research
salesforce.com inc.
BMW’s Winter Olympics Ad
Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and
hazardous occupation, because the prophet invariably
falls between two stools.
• If his prediction sounds at all reasonable, you can be quite
sure that in 20 or at most 50 years the progress of science and
technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative.
• If a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to
take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so
farfetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn.
If what I say now seems to be very reasonable, then I’ll fail
completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable,
have you any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.
- Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 1964
I Propose To Be Unreasonable – Believably
Facts – what we can see is true right now
Observations – selected facts and calculations
Consequences – projections, scenarios, boundary cases
Actions – what we can do right now
Long View – what to watch; what would change our plan
By no accident at all, this turns out to have an acronym:
Permit me to introduce FOCAL
Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)
Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)
Social Interaction: 757M people logged in to Facebook daily (4Feb’14)
Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)
Social Interaction: 757M people logged in to Facebook daily (4Feb’14)
Internet of Things: 2-3B devices were already connected
Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)
Social Interaction: 757M people logged in to Facebook daily (4Feb’14)
Internet of Things: 2-3B devices were already connected
Data Science: Average salary topped $89k (11Apr’13)
Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)
Social Interaction: 757M people logged in to Facebook daily (4Feb’14)
Internet of Things: 2-3B devices were already connected
Data Science: Average salary topped $89k (11Apr’13)
InfoSec: ½ of sensitive data were exposed (Dec’12)
Higher Ed: ½-life of 4-year degree was ~18 mos. (1Mar’13)
Labor Force: 20-30% of Fortune 100 were “contingent” (Mar’12)
Healthcare: Cancer overtook heart disease in U.S. deaths (CDC & ACS)
Competitiveness: 40% of MFG.com member
companies won new business in 1H12 that
had previously been offshored (27Jun’12)
Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
Observations and Consequences
People connected 24x7 → Social nets are lifestyle rather than activity;
everyone has “trusted advisor” networks and concierges always on call
Smartphone always at hand → control panel available for any device, less
need to shoehorn a UI into everything; hands/eyes-free interaction
Connected devices the norm, not the exception → too many apps, need a
universal container and a common convention for user interface
Graying populations rely on connected/adaptive devices to “age in place”
Data drive new disciplines with accelerating turnover of knowledge;
continuing education and increasing “freelancerization”
Massive data feeds & fusions → unexpected combinations will disclose
activities & associations, with major trust implications
Actions
Connected customers = reduced “retail arbitrage” opportunity: impels
unbundling of services, transparent value-based pricing
Connection explosion creates demand for adaptive algorithms yielding
more autonomous behavior: think Nest thermostat, not Mission Control
Apps explosion has to be contained: requires a universal container /
orchestrator and common conventions for user interface
Everything needs an API that goes beyond exposing functions, able to
participate in conversations for value-adding interactions
APIs and connections must stop relying on obscurity and novelty for
protection, adopting “trust but verify” safeguards & negotiation protocols
Long View
The safest predictions are based on demographics
The next-safest are based on geography
Can disruption be forecast? Research unconvincing
Are basic cultural norms up for grabs?
Gender roles
Work/life balance
Family size & structure
Definition of “standard of living”
Is there an optimal strategy? Or is it all just game theory?
“When the monsoon is over, you don’t throw away your umbrella”
“If a crisis requires change of strategy, you didn’t have a strategy”
“Geopolitics is about broad
impersonal forces that
constrain nations and human
beings and compel them to
act in certain ways.”
– George Friedman
Coda: The Medium View?
“Forecasting is best left to the long run, the
span over which individual decisions don’t carry
so much weight. But having forecast for the long
run, you can reel back your scenario and try to
see how it plays out in, say, a decade.”
“What makes this time frame interesting is that it
is sufficiently long for the larger, impersonal
forces to be at play but short enough for the
individual decisions of individual leaders to skew
outcomes that otherwise might seem inevitable.
A decade is the point at which history and
statesmanship meet, and a span in which
policies still matter.”
– George Friedman
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Peter Coffee
VP for Strategic Research
salesforce.com inc. [email protected]
@petercoffee
in/petercoffee
Bibliography
• www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-and-tablet-penetration-2013-10
• www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/04/facebook-in-numbers-statistics
• blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-connections-counter/
• www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-the-digital-universe-in-2020.pdf
• www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522085217.htm
• http://trendwatching.com/trends/upgradia/
• www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/education/edlife/universities-offer-courses-in-a-hot-new-field-data-science.html
• www.futuristspeaker.com/2013/03/the-half-life-of-a-college-education/
• blog.lib.umn.edu/cdescomm/cdes_memo/Thomas_Fisher_Public_Sector_Spring2012.pdf
• www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
• www.alz.org/downloads/facts_figures_2013.pdf
• unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2013_en.pdf
• www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2013_e/its2013_e.pdf
• www.forbes.com/sites/mitchfree/2012/06/27/is-the-re-shoring-of-manufacturing-a-trend-or-a-trickle/