Skip to main content

Understanding the Internet Revolution

Man is a social animal, this was the first lie they ever told you in your history classes. If we look at the human history going back through the dark ages, we understand that man is anything but a social animal.
The agriculture revolution gave control of food in everyone hand and we started building societies, bringing people socially together. But when societies formed it brought all sorts of people together and caused all sorts of conflicts between them. Somewhere in the middle ages, few smart people realized this and decided to kick start a religious revolution. They established common guidelines for communities to work cohesively without stepping on each others foot. But they could not achieve this without control of information. With control comes fear and with fear comes faith. They established Churches, Mosques and Temples and controlled the information to reach heaven.
But the voices of dissident did not merge, not easily, they just were suppressed. A few kings got on to the idea and decided to infuse this religious fever in their governance model. The entire Europe was established on the principle. Now the religious revolution had fear, faith and power to do stuff. The voices of dissident were brutally killed and the fear increased.
As we entered the industrial revolution, fear gripped the nation and so did faith. Together they created a working class that dreamt of a better world. At that time, two teenagers were working on another Book that would rock the world, they were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The book they authored was 'Communist Manifesto' and they formed the labour revolution.
The labour revolution gave power to the voices of dissident that were hiding till that time. The labour revolution and the religious fever gave rise to democratic system. People decided time was for change and a new form of system was brought out. The democratic system was gift wrapped to the citizens as a government of their own. It was a government that majority agreed. They elected representatives and send them in the parliament, not knowing that the game itself was rigged. These elected representatives worked for the greater good but they were part of the old system, were control of information was essential. This new system was using the same old principle of withholding information thus causing fear and faith among the masses. That gave rise of conspiracy theories and the voices of dissident were termed lunatic and unpatriotic. 
A young college drop-out was working his way to do something he never expected, this was Bill Gates and he was trying to sell a personal computer. When he introduced the concept of Personal Computing, people laughed at him. Why would anyone need a personal computer? They were happy with computers at universities and workplaces but computers at every home? That was madness.
But that madness ensured. Bill Gates (knowingly or unknowingly) kick-started a computing revolution (Although the credit for computer goes to Alan Turing, I personally believe that the idea of Personal Computer was introduced to the world by Bill Gates). Steve Jobs lost the race in computing but regained his spirit in mobile computing. Between them they brought the power of computing to individual people.
The voices of dissident now had a platform. A free and fair medium that was so vast that no one could control and thus the cloud was born. Internet revolution broke the backbone of traditional institutions that relied of information control. These institution are religious, corporations and even Governments.
The power of internet brought with him the Occupy Protests, WikiLeaks and many more to come. What does this mean for business?
It means we are standing exactly where Matthew McConaughey was standing on the Millers Planet in the movie interstellar. What we are seeing as mountains are waves, big tsunami waves and they are not coming towards us. Like the Millers planet, our world, everything we know is moving towards them. We have already started descending into the next phase in human social revolution.
The information is no longer controllable, the dissident voices are no longer silenced. The problems can no longer be put on back-burner. The governments are running scared, trying to control the internet but this is an illusion. Social Media and Cloud Computing are two by-products of this massive revolution. We are moving away from the traditional computing model. We are moving from the controlled model of dispensing information based on location and time. It can still be achieved and is required for security but that is just an illusion.
If your 'social media' strategy does not include 'listening' to those voices, you are being pulled near that wave. If your corporate strategy does not include social media you are being pulled into that wave. Your employees, your customers and your partners are on social media. They are carrying devices that could leak complaints about you at any given point of time. How far can you control them?
The changes internet revolution is bringing are disruptive. They are here to stay. Anyone who pretends otherwise is still believing the waves are mountains and very far away.
Of-course this article is completely speculative and has no real evidence but we have already seen the changes happening around. We can always pretend that nothing of that sort is happening and go back to our life.
But the world will keep on moving and with it bring a new wave of change. How far we prepare for that change completely depends on us.
Pic: Luis Llerena 
Crossposted from Linkedin


Popular posts from this blog

Video: Top ten tips on how not to ruin Salesforce implementation

Another presentation for the London Salesforce Developer Group using mobile app. 
When it comes to Salesforce development, we all know what it takes to deliver stuff. Having a certified professional helps you gain a knowledgeable partner but what about the things such as common sense?  We all know how to deliver things on client requirements but what about things that are not mentioned by the client. We will be discussing in details things that will enhance the user experience, focus on tips to read your customers mind and have a bit of perspective on the user experience.

Cache me if you can: What you should know before daring to set URL parameter on visualforce

If someone gave me a pence for every time there was an SOQL query in an APEX Class without using Limit or a condition during a code review, I could afford a Lamborgini this month. Sigh. If only. We make it a habit of going digging for data, at the very moment we need it. The crux of this problem happens when you have chain classes which are independent of each other. Each class needs the reference from a single record and we have to query for that record every single time.

While we don't see it, every SOQL query has a cost to it, and it does not go in my Lamborghini fund, however, it should. In a recent project, we had to construct an Account 360 page that could fetch information from different integration points. The page was also called using a live telephony integration, which could pass the phone number for the account. This required an ability to keep in context the Account that was on call.

Passing the Account id in URL parameter was a valid option, however, any manipulatio…

Four secrets to improve the usability of your visualforce/Lightning pages on Salesforce

In the immortal words of a certain machine returning back in time, I am back. For now. After procrastinating for over a year and drafting a lot of rants- I am back with a very important coding lesson for you. For now.

When we are designing a Visualforce page or an app or a lightning component (added that only to trick google) or any web page for that matter, we often tend to wrap up things quickly. Ask anyone on the team, how to design a good User Experience? and the person will immediately throw buzz words like Bootstrap, angular and other useless libraries (did someone squint?)

Ok, Bootstrap, Angular-Js, and all the libraries are really cool and are useful in designing a fabulous UI. They are helpful in creating responsive pages that will work on all the devices but this post is not about those. Nope. For the purpose of this post, all the external libraries and buzzwords you use to decorate your resume are useless. (Adding Angular JS in your resume for a Salesforce consultant posit…