From Brian Zisk, one of the most successful netpreneurs around:
Thought I'd add a few comments, though if you'd like to follow up, drop
me
an email or give me a call, as I don't really participate in the
Entrepreneurs conference on the well as I (and others) have been treated
rudely by the host too many times (who has stated that the reason this
conference is dead is because there are hardly any entrepreneurs on the
well, hahaha).
Too bad for the conference (and the people of the well), as it
could've/should've been an awesome resource for all of us...
It's hard to predict what new technologies will be most influential.
However it's easy to predict that there will be companies in various
industries whose rise will be based on the added power and efficiency
brought to them by advances in software. In essence, the leaders in many
industries, (such as trucking, manufacturing, distribution, and on and
on) will be "software companies" (that is where their competitive
advantages will lie), and they will beat out the other companies based on
how they use computers to better manage their information (and thus money
and product) flow.
While the better access to information provided by the web will allow
more and better transactions to take place (the essence of our
http://www.transaction.net site, and the force which drives such net
superstars as
http://www.ebay.com ) the lack of critical mass and
difficulty for companies to have the knowledge base which will currently
allow them to implement profitable systems is what keeps most companies
(especially non-computer related ones) from implementing successful web
commerce systems.
As time moves on, places such as Ebay and ViaWeb (now Yahoo Store) will
show companies hat it may not be as difficult as they'd been lead to
believe.
Hopefully decisionmaking aids (as technology, such as reputation based
filtering) will allow companies to make better/more profitable
decisions/business practices in the future. On a small scale this is
working now (ie. San FranZiskGo!
http://www.transaction.net/sanfran/events/ helps people determine (using
a
reputation based filtering model)) which events to frequent on a nightly
basis. In the future (it's already started), more complex models will be
put into place, showing people choices based on algorithyms determined by
your and other people's choices. These (however) will most probably not
be
widely implemented (nearly to the extent possible) over the next 3-5
years.
As software companies saturate the expensive, high end, corporate market,
in order to grab more custumers they will indeed migrate down to the
smaller customers.
Companies like Microsoft will indeed dictate a lot of solutions for
larger clients, but it will continue to be the small companies which come
out with the major innovations. My guess is that most innovations will
need to run on the most popular hardware configurations, and thus imho
most innovations we see coming along in the next bunch of years will be
designed to run on the Intel platform. So they're a major force, and will
not go away, evenif the whole computing world happened to turn open
source, hurting Microsoft immensely. I do believe that if the whole world
decided to go open source that Bill Gates would be smart enough to
release all Microsoft soure code and turn into a customer support
organization, but that's at least a few years down the road. ;-)
I believe that new technologies will infiltrate all industries, and the
most successful (in pretty much all industries) will be the ones which
most resemble software companies.
Microsoft does indeed pose a threat to small companies as they move into
smaller niches. It's hard to compete with them, so what you have to do is
maintain a niche which they can't touch you in, such as street
credibility and soul.
How companies learn to work with the new technologies will be just as
important to a companies success as what those new technologies happen to
be, and thus some companies will successfully addapt, and others will be
left behind in the dust.
And yes, the learning (and cost) curve behind new technologies are
definitely what is keeping most businesses from addapting them.
Most accounting packages for small businesses do not really get it.
For instance, using Quickbooks (or Quicken), it's so difficult to make
projections based on actual data (passed through various scenarios) that
the best way seems to be to pull data out and manipulate it using Excel.
So they may be adequate if you define a small business as one which is
too small to need financial projections, but even a lemonade stand should
be projecting what they need.
Hope this rapidly written rant is helpful. Anyone with anymore questions,
please don't hesitate to ask.