Alea iacta est

The die has been cast. So said Julius Caesar after he had crossed the Rubicon river and realized there was no turning back. As a society we are now wading into the safe shallows of our most recent Rubicon, the most devastating economic crisis known to any living person. But the question arises, what is this world we are entering into? Is it going to be a remake of the one before the economic crisis. If it is then I am not quite sure that we are capable of learning. As Gordon Gecko stated in Wall Street, Greed is good, I would like to add , so is responsibility. But what of it? On Monday Morning's Bonnier R&D brainstorming session my esteemed colleague Björn Jeffery made a very interesting observation pertaining to a new world order. He said what if our competitors of tomorrow are not interested in making money? Rather they are quite content in making enough money. He illustrated his point by the true revolutionaries of the web that manage Craiglist in the States. A 30 man operation that destroyed a multi-billion dollar industry. Whichever way you look at it if there every were Digital Robin Hoods its these cats. Björn and I chatted further afterwards and it became apparent that we all know WHAT it is we need to do but it's the HOW that we need to scrutinise alott more. If what we want to do as corporates is to survive we seriously need to rethink the how. Bludgeoning our way forward with capital and man power might not be the best answer. We need more people with rapiers and less tanks.

The web is maturing. Few people know that the commercial web is nearing 20 years in age. It's out of adolescence and fixed behavioral patterns are becoming more common. Who is the web ? What personality traits does this creation of ours have? Well we know it suffers fools. They abound the digital corridors and everybody with a soapbox can have their 15 seconds of digital applause. We know it never ever forgets. We do, but it will catalogue you and index you and long after you are gone and your great grandchildren are gone your digital residue will still be available for anyone who cares to find out. We also know that the web is not capital friendly. Apart from IPO'ing the web startups that have come and gone over the last two decades have been a dismal failure. The success rate has been absolutely abysmal. Don't let the Google's and the Amazons fool you. If you make a comparative ratio of successful business online as opposed to those that have been created I believe it would make for shocking reading. It has truly been the destroyer of business plans. With my limited social knowledge I believe that the web also has been, and still is, the singular biggest social event in human history. And seriously, the traditional industrialists still believe that they can contain and control it. I reckon those days are over.

This brave new world that we are going into is in need of change. In the next 5 years there will be a complete upheaval off businesses and when the gears of economy picks up steam it will inevitably speed up the change. These two events of the last few years, the maturing of the web and the destruction of the economic system have worked in tandem and it seems that the economic crisis has hidden the cracks the web was making in traditional business. But now that markets are starting to go into the green these cracks in traditional business will become canyons. Now we humans have to ask, can we think fast than the collective that is the WEB? Can we stay ahead? I have my reservations but I can honestly say that it is great to be alive and in the eye of the storm!