Technology drives consumer change?

When Tim Berners Lee conceived the system for turning the internet into a publishing medium on 6 August 1991 and called it the World Wide Web, little did he know that this would give birth to a whole new world that would enwrap a consumer.

It was free so anyone had the opportunity to use it, whilst it was the day where everyone became a journalist. If we are not happy with a product or service, millions get to know about it in a matter of minutes. I guess it’s not too far-fetched to mention that it was 6 August 1991 that changed the world.

If we take a busy executive’s life, they will check the daily news headlines on the iPad early morning and then do some catching up with the extended family by strolling down a wall on Facebook whilst the business networking is done on Twitter. All this has changed our life.

40 billion pages

Today almost everyone surfs the net and user-ship has grown exponentially. No one knows how big it is. Recently at a global conference Yahoo’s Head of Research and Development put the size of the World Wide Web at 80 billion pages, but the size of the ‘deep’ web, the area where the web pages are assembled on the fly and served up in response to clicked-upon links, is estimated to be between 400-750 times greater than the part indexed by search engines.

As you read this article, 1,000 pages may be added to WWW, which explains the power of this medium. The brand Facebook is valued at almost one hundred billion dollars, which gives us the view of the new companies that have come to light due to the WWW.

Way of life

By any standards, the web represents a colossal change in our information environment and the pattern of our life. The strange thing is that it has come to reality in just 18 years. Actually, most of it happened in less than that, because the web only went mainstream in 1993, when the first graphical browsers – the computer programs we use to access the web – were released. So these are early days.

We can no more envisage the long-term implications of what has happened. The strange thing is how casually we have come to take it for granted. We buy books from Amazon, airline tickets from SriLankan Airlines website for lower rates. In fact it has become the most natural thing in world now - a consumer’s life has surely changed.

Amazon was a river

One can buy anything except body parts on eBay. Children seeking pictures for school projects search them on Google images and download them without undue concern for intellectual property rights. All this we now take for granted.



To get a handle on the scale of what has happened, think back 15 years ago. Amazon was a large river in South America, now it is one of the most sought-after book store; Ryan Air is the top-of-the-mind budget airline that flies to places nobody had ever heard of; eBay was a typo but now the best place for auctions. Yahoo was a term from Gulliver’s Travels but now it is one of the websites in the world that has been visited by billions of consumers around the world and changed their life. Let me take a few key websites that have driven the change of lifestyle of a global consumer.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998. It commands the largest internet search engine in the world.

It is the fastest-growing company in history and its founders are worth almost $ 13 b each. There are over a billion search requests per day that really demonstrates that how a consumer lifestyle has changed with the launch of the internet.

The search method devised by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was instrumental to Goggle’s success. Rather than ranking results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page, their system measured the frequency with which a website was referenced by other sites. Another key factor was the site’s stripped-down design, which made it speedier and more accessible than its competitors.

The internet’s premier auction site founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995. The number of users exceeds 300 million. It has been reported that people spend more time on eBay than any other internet site. There are more than 20 million users in the UK alone. eBay is far from just a second-hand stall. New items are sold daily by global companies; many people have abandoned their jobs to work for eBay full time, which again explains the changing life style of a consumer and the opportunity that the internet provides for employment.

When I met up the founder of eBay at the global CEO forum, I asked him what he wanted the company to be in 2030 and his answer was “I do not, as sometimes technology may even wipe out the company,” which is true. That’s why people make companies and then sell them, making multiple million dollars in the process.

Founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in 2005. YouTube claims that 200 million clips are watched every day. Through the grass root power of the internet and good word of mouth, the site went places where amateur film makers show off their talent. Not all television studios embraced the idea of their archived copyrighted footage being shared.

Now eminent companies like NBC last week announced recently to work alongside YouTube, airing exclusive clips and trailers whilst many youngsters now watch the world happenings only on YouTube. They do not read newspapers or watch television, which is the challenge that parents are up against at home.

 Founded by David Filo and JerryYang, 1994, it already has over 400 million users the world over. It receives an average of 3.4 b page hits a day, making it the single most visited website on the internet, but in recent years Yahoo! has been eclipsed by Google.

Both companies were launched on a very small scale by Stanford University graduates and very soon the portal that Jerry Yang and David Filo had started as a hobby was en route to becoming the most popular search engine on the web.

On the back of its early success, Yahoo! (an acronym for ‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle’) branched out into email, instant messaging, news, gaming, online shopping and an array of other services which demonstrates once again the changing lifestyle of a consumer. It also started buying up other companies such as Geocities, eGroups and the web radio company Broadcast.com.

Yahoo! survived the internet collapse at the start of the decade and brought former Warner Bros Chief Exec Terry Semel on board in 2001 to navigate the difficult waters of the post-boom period. Semel drove strategy to address the challenge of making money out of the internet without relying on advertising revenue alone which has worked. Yahoo is today a power brand in the global landscape.

Jeff Bezoz founded the company in 1994 and created another revolution among youngsters. Positioned in a consumer’s mind for purchasing books, CDs and DVDs, it is in fact earth’s biggest bookstore. It was originally called Cadabra, but Jeff Bezos thought again after his lawyer misheard it as ‘cadaver’.

He chose Amazon as something large and unstoppable and so, with current annual revenues of $ 8 b, it has proved. It was just a trickle to begin with though: the first office was in a Seattle suburb with desks made out of old doors. But it quickly became the headline act of the dotcom miracle and Bezos was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1999.

Amazon’s continued dominance rests on price-slashing that would make Wal-Mart wince, and a reputation for reliability. Though selling books (and now almost everything else) on a vast scale, it has tried never to forget the value of intimacy.

Facebook is a social networking service launched in February 2004, owned and operated by Facebook, Inc. As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users, more than half of them using Facebook on a mobile device.

Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.The website’s membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University.

It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. A day will not go by without many of going through our FB wall even if we have not read the newspapers.

Twitter is an online social networking service and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July.

The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. Since its launch, Twitter has become one of the top 10 most visited websites on the Internet, and has been described as the SMS of the internet.

Unregistered users can read tweets, while registered users can post tweets through the website interface, SMS, or a range of apps for mobile devices which tells us the power of this medium on connectivity.

Next steps

Each of us must wrap around one of the above on a daily basis if we are to stay relevant in today’s world.

We must engage different circles of friends but in a relevant manner. Maybe use LinkedIn for business networking and Facebook to be touch with the extended family.

If we are running a business rather than using conventional advertising move towards social media as this is where global brands create awareness and drive consumer purchase.

We must monitor social media on a daily basis if we use it. If not it can become an issue as it is a viral mode of communication and people can abuse it and it will hurt your brand image.

There is no such thing as staying away from it all and going on holiday. You have no option but to stay wired in today’s world. If not you become irrelevant.





(Rohantha works for the United Nations – UNOPS – and can be contacted on [email protected]. The above thoughts are strictly his personal views based on his doctoral research study program.)