All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Digital|Last Updated:

The future of the automobile industry seems pretty clear, and relevant to anyone involved in things Digital.

For those living in the suburbs, exurbs, and beyond, it will look a lot like it does right now: People will own or lease cars and use them to take themselves from place to place.

Having moved to a downtown condo a couple of years ago, I’m pretty confident a different model will become popular among us urbanites:

When I need a car, my NeedACar app will dispatch one. It will drive itself to wherever I am, take me wherever I want to go, and drive itself back to its home garage when I don’t need it anymore.

Imagine you (1) agree; and (2) are involved in strategic planning for a company in the industry. Plus, you’re digitally literate and consume science fiction at least occasionally — two essential qualifications.

And yes, while we’re exploring the automobile industry, the same thought processes apply to players in any other industry, too.

So … how do you size up your situation?

Start with the field of logical competitors, and how readily each of them can adapt to this new world of transportation.

Other automobile manufacturer/dealer consortia: These all have one certain and one potential advantage. The certain advantage is that no matter what the future looks like, someone will have to manufacture the cars. The potential one is brand loyalty: Even in an era of autonomous cars it seem likely that many drivers …well, in this scenario passengers … might have a preference for some makes and models over others.

But dealers will probably lack the scale needed to just house the fleets in question let alone manage them, and manufacturers by themselves have no ability to sell directly to consumers.

Uber: Using an app to get personal transportation to someone who needs it sounds a lot like Uber, except for the autonomous car part. Uber pretty much owns the mindshare of people who want on-demand transportation.

What Uber doesn’t have is a fleet of autonomous cars and the infrastructure that goes with one. Quite the opposite: Uber’s model works in large part because it’s made car ownership and maintenance Someone Else’s Problem.

Traditional taxi services do own and manage car fleets. But they haven’t even figured out how to compete with Uber. It’s unlikely they’ll figure out how to deal with on-demand autonomous self-service transportation.

Also, traditional taxis are pretty ugly.

Car rental companies would seem to be well-positioned for the scenario we’re exploring. They’re accustomed to managing large fleets and they’re in the business of providing vehicles on demand.

What they don’t have is the ability to cater to make-and-model preferences. Also, their fleets are concentrated in single large locations proximate to the local airport. In most cities the airport … and rental car centers … are located well away from the metro core, which means long delivery delays for the urbanites who are the core market for the service we’re talking about.

Turo and its brethren are Airbnb for car owners. If you won’t be using your car for a while you could make it available to people who need one.

With the addition of autonomous vehicles this model would seem to have a lot going for it — no need to own a fleet; a wide variety of makes and models on the street; and because the cars are self-driving the major inconvenience barrier — having to arrange meeting places to deliver and return the vehicle — goes away. It would, however, depend on car owners leaving their garage doors open.

Amazon: I have no idea what Amazon would bring to this party, beyond its obvious broad reach among consumers. Except for this: It didn’t occur to Best Buy that Amazon was even a competitor until far too late in the game, just as it didn’t occur to mainstream publishers that Amazon was a competitor until far too late in that game, and didn’t occur to traditional data-center outsourcers that Amazon might become a competitor until the game was nearly over.

Which gets us to the point of this little exercise: As companies dip their toes in the Digital waters, they’re (and by “they’re” I mean “you’re”) going to have to do far more than use Digital capabilities to gain an edge over the competitors they have right now.

They’re going to have to anticipate who their competitors will be once the innovation gears have gone through a few rotations.

Or, even better, they’ll choose some better competitors to beat than the ones they’re competing with right now.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Travel is supposed to broaden the mind. Regrettably, after more than 21 years of writing this column, my mental ruts seem to resist travel’s broadening impacts: Everything I see turns into guidance for running businesses, IT organizations, and all points in between.

And so, following a couple of weeks touring in Rome and exploring bits and pieces of Sicily …

> The Romans built the Colosseum in eight years, with no project management or CAD software to help them. It’s about 2,000 years old and still standing. That should worry us.

> The Colosseum’s construction depended on two innovations: concrete, and interchangeable parts built to standard specifications. If any Roman architects, artists, or engineers suffered from change resistance, those who embraced the innovations apparently drowned them out.

> The Colosseum’s standard program was executions in the morning, followed by slaughtering exotic animals, followed in turn by gladiators trying to hack each other to bits.

I think this means we have to give the Romans credit for inventing standing meetings with standard agendas.

It also suggests they were early victims of the consequences of bad metrics. Because every day started out with executions, the Roman courts had to convict enough suspects of capital crimes to fill out the program, whether or not a sufficient number of capital crimes had been committed. I presume the parallels are obvious.

In any event, combining the morning executions and gladiators who got the old thumbs down, a million corpses exited the Colosseum’s fabled arches during the years it was in session, although the pace slowed a bit when Rome became Christian and did away with the gladiators.

I guess that was progress. Speaking of which, for the Roman Empire, conquest was what you did if you could. Now, it’s frowned upon. That’s progress, too, I guess.

> While walking through the Pantheon our guide pointed out a row of headless statues. They weren’t, he assured us, early examples of Dr. Guillotine’s work products.

It was due to Roman parsimony. Coming from a practical society, Roman artists figured out the average statue would greatly outlive the person it had been carved to honor. And so, they designed their statues to have replaceable heads.

In IT we call this “modular design.”

> We didn’t spend all of our time in the Colosseum (and Pantheon and Forum). We also toured the Vatican, where, in the Basilica, we saw evidence of St. Peter’s tribulations. As it happens, visitors rub St. Peter’s feet for luck. No, not St. Peter himself but a bronze statue thereof. Bad luck for St. Peter. After centuries of this his feet are being rubbed right off, toes first.

I’m pretty sure we in IT have parallels to muster. If not, elsewhere in technology land I’ve read we’re running out of helium, one birthday balloon at a time.

Sicily has been more relaxing, at least from the perspective of spotting IT parallels. I’m hopeful this might mean I haven’t completely lost my ability to disconnect from the world of information technology. But there is Mount Etna, an awesome and awe-inspiring site.

> On the not-a-parallel-at-all front, shortly before its recent eruption, data integrated from a variety of sensors reported a 10 centimeter increase in the mountain’s elevation (about 3 inches if the metric system isn’t your bag; also about 3 inches if it is your bag only you don’t need me to handle the conversion for you).

Where was I? Oh, that’s right, 10 centimeters, and I hope you aren’t so blasé that you aren’t awed by our ability as a species to measure such things with such precision — a precision that allowed geologists to warn everyone potentially in harm’s way so they could get out of harm’s way.

> On the back-to-parallels front, Mount Etna doesn’t have just one crater, although the main caldera is enormous.

It has hundreds of craters. That’s because, when pressure increases and the old eruption paths are plugged, the magma doesn’t metaphorically say to itself, oh, gee, I guess I’d better calm down and head back to the earth’s mantle.

Nope. The pressure is there, the result of physical forces that can’t be eliminated and physical laws that can’t be repealed.

The result: The magma has to go somewhere, and where it goes is the path of least resistance, culminating in it pushing through the side of the mountain, resulting in a new eruption and new crater from which it spews out.

The business/IT parallel is, I trust, clear: Good luck trying to stamp out shadow IT, which is also the result of pressures that won’t go away just because you want them to.

It’s time for me to head back to the beach. The IT parallel? None.

Ahhhhhhh.

Comments