Uneven Distribution.

Your mainframe will survive.

April 21st, 2009

This snippet of Larry Ellison talking about cloud computing is well worth listening to. Not just because he utterly slams the idea of ‘cloud computing’ as an evolutionary term in the software industry, but because what he is talking about goes way beyond nerds talking about Gmail or Salesforce.

What he is talking about is a problem of language, and the result it has on the mindset of an entire industry.

As technology has exponentially advanced, we have reached a point where it’s relevance and, more importantly, the way in which it’s relevance can be communicated, has outpaced the general public’s ability to understand and make use of it. In the software industry one result of this has been the concept of cloud computing. In the marketing industry, one result has been social media, and in particular the role of social media as marketing’s saviour. I would hope anyone who’s reading this accepts by now that all media is inherently social, so while the manifestations of conversations may be more visible, public, and accessible, what is happening is by no means new.

In much the same way billions of dollars has been poured into startups offering services with a buzzword at their heart (but offering no real point of difference), brands are now starting to pay an inordinate amount of attention to these latest idioms. Partially because they don’t understand them, and partially because they have been sold on the idea that these concepts are so new and fresh that they must be the answer to all of their marketing problems. But on their own they’re not. They’re just an evolution that’s a little harder to grasp than every other step this industry has taken. And what worries me is that plenty of people are assuming that we have taken one giant leap, when in fact we’ve just moved on a bit. Everything that came before is still just behind us, and it’s still just as relevant.

“When is this idiocy going to stop? I’ve been at this a very long time. There’s still mainframes. That was the first industry that was going to be destroyed. And watching mainframes being destroyed is like watching a glacier melt.”

I’ve worked as an industrial designer, a graphic designer, web designer, and somehow ended up in advertising. But at the heart of what I have always done is communication. If you think that it’s impossible to communicate your brand through its physical design, its packaging, or its TV ad, but social media is your saviour because it’s 2-way or because it’s measurable, you’re in for a shock. It’s an evolution, yes, and it’s essential to whatever it is you’re communicating, but it’s not the answer to everything. And it’s not going to solve your inability to create great work in those other areas. Because when your customer service twitter account scales (which it must do if you actually want it to be worth the investment), it will end up as just another outsourced call centre.

And then, you’re back to square one. And the whole time you’ve been ignoring your mainframe, and it hasn’t disappeared.

Postscript: I linked to this post in a tweet with the caveat that a “healthy dose of devil’s advocate is included”. I think the thought of the current state of the marketing landscape being affected by a problem of language is incredibly interesting and not completely incorrect. If the thinking in our industry could be modeled in economic terms, I’m sure we’d be ready for a correction. And just like an economic correction, no one can tell how far off course we really are.

Comments

Great post Nic. Totally agree. Seems many are confusing an evolution with a revolution.