The World We Used To Know

The technology boom of the last decade has hastened the pace of seemingly everything in our lives these days.

First, we saw VHS rental stores move to DVDs. Then we saw the music industry caught with their pants down as young people illegally downloaded their favorite CDs rather than purchase them from the local "record" store. Then we saw DVD rental store chains close (Blockbuster, Hollywood, etc.) as first Netflix and later Red Box ate their lunch. Then we witnessed the supernatural growth of Amazon and their Kindle e-reader and the resulting demise of both independent book stores and now the second largest book seller in the industry (Borders).

For a decade, Blackberry smart phones ruled the roost in corporate America when getting email was all somebody needed from their phone. That was before Apple introduced the iPhone and and iPhone App Store and demonstrated all the things that people didn't know they were missing from their smart phone. Shortly thereafter, Android powered phones took on Apple and now are the fastest growing operating system in the industry. Now Fortune 500 companies are baling on Blackberry and scooping up the latest gen of iPhone and Android.

Until recently, nobody worried about how their website looked on a phone. That was before the crisp screens that now deliver beautiful looking graphics made looking at websites on a phone a much less painful experience. Now mobile websites are all the rage.

Just as we got comfortable jamming gig after gig of applications, photos, music, videos and more on our overtaxed laptaps, in walks "the cloud" all decked out in a sleek, modern get-up.

Now we will all move backwards toward "dumb" terminals and get all of our applications and content that used to reside on our computer from "the cloud."

So as we look at iconic brands today and think about how we could never do without them, let's say a prayer for Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Tower Records, Borders Books, Napster, AOL, Compuserv, Earthlink Saturn, Palm Pilots, Lehman Brothers, Kodak, Polaroid, Gateway Computers, Nextel, Northwest Airlines, Walkman, Circuit City, K-Mart, GM (the original one, not the new one), Oldsmobile, Pontiac and so many more. Think Google could never go away? Think Facebook is here forever? Just remember, we used to use AltaVista, Netscape and Ask Jeeves as our search engines.