Surviving in the Information Age

Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" provides many profound theories. Survival of the fittest and natural selection are two major themes he presents. Darwin depicts the earth as a ecosystem where there is a constant struggle between species for both survival and dominance. Natural selection is the process in which nature favors stronger and better adapted members of a species, thus advancing their cause in the battle for survival.

In the dot com bubble, there was much speculation that traditional businesses would quickly succumb to their newly created Internet counterparts. Traditional businesses were described as dinosaurs unprepared for the new Internet-based economy. Almost 15 years later, the business landscape has greatly changed due to the Internet. However, the traditional corporations have faired much better than their dot com competitors.

Business who have a traditional of success have evolved over time to attain their position at the top of the food chain. They have mastered, or at a minimum managed, key areas such as cash flow, innovation, customer service, distribution and marketing. Most of the now defunct dot-com companies lacked these fundamentals. When the Internet introduced a new level of competition, the more evolved businesses survived. Additionally, many of these traditional businesses found ways to leverage the power of the Internet. In this way, many traditional companies evolved and adapted to the new conditions that the Internet created.

However, we are seeing how the Internet has introduced brand new business species such as search engines (Google), online auctions (eBay), movie subscription services (NetFlix), peer-to-peer file sharing (Bit Torrent), VoIP (Skype), to name a few. These new species are much more harmful to the status quo than the dot com e-commerce businesses were (Pets.com, WebVan, enter your favorite dot-com bust here.) These breeds of Internet giants are not competing with traditional businesses directly, but instead have better understood ways to thrive in the new ecosystem that the Internet created. Billion dollar industries including the recording industry, newspapers and magazines are struggling to survive in the information age and may eventually face extinction.

The Internet reduces barriers and creates massive competition between all businesses. There will be rapid business extinction in geographies (manufacturing in the US?) and whole industries as mentioned above. The struggle to survive will be ever greater for any business. Only those who develop sound business fundamentals, learn to adapt and thrive in the information age, and continue to rapidly evolve will make it to the top of their industries. We are at the very early stages of the mobile and wireless revolution, and this will once again change the business ecosystem and create opportunities and challenges. Some industry leaders will continue to evolve and thrive in a mobile world, and we will also see new business species introduced which currently do not exist.

To quote Greek philospher Heraclitus, "Nothing endures but change." Now more than ever that is true for businesses.