Lesson 1. Information Accelerates Everything

Everywhere you look, a new information paradigm is accelerating the metabolism of products, companies, and industries. In industry after industry, the development cycle for products and services grows ever shorter. And, like the shift from film photography to digital photography, once you change the process from a material, mechanical basis to a digital and informational one, the match is lit for an explosive acceleration of the market.

How explosive? In 1995, 710 million rolls of film were developed at thousands of processing centers. By 2005, nearly 200 billion digital photographs, the equivalent of about eight billion rolls, had been snapped, edited, stored, and displayed in ways that were unimaginable just a decade earlier. Today, web users upload almost five billion photographs per day to sites such as Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. (1)

As we saw in Chapter 1, a similar shift from analog to digital is occurring in multiple core technologies with multiplier effects at their intersections. This process of dematerializing or “virtualizing” one industry after another is advancing exponentially, at multiples, as data about different components or processes is systematically analyzed and automated by software.

(1)  How Many Photos Are There? (2023) 50+ Photos Statistics