You may have already seen this clip of Pattie Maes unveiling the “sixth sense” wearable technology at TED. If not, I recommend checking it out.
This clip, along with a great post by Steve Rubel about Open Web, has me thinking about what the future holds for technology, and how different organizations might be able to capitalize on it. Seems to me that Pattie’s talk and Steve’s post more or less point to the same trends:
Name the one thing that your company does. Think carefully before responding, because you’ll never be able to do anything else under the same brand name.
I think that’s a little extreme, but I was surprised to learn how passionately some people believe it to be true. About a week ago I wrote a short piece in response to Laura Ries’s post about UPS. In her post, Laura invokes a classic Ries line: “once your brand stands for something in the mind, it is impossible to change the brand’s position.” She goes on to use UPS (shipping), Kodak (film), and Blockbuster (video rental stores) as examples of brands that stand for just “one thing,” and therefore failed (or will fail, in the case of UPS) to be perceived as doing anything else well under that brand name. Follow her logic, and it’s why Kodak isn’t a leader in digital photography and Blockbuster’s Netflix-like service never took off.
