Five More Years?

Last week, I talked about just how difficult it will be for anyone to accurately predict the future because of the rapid pace of changes now taking place. Yet, if what I’ve read recently is correct, really big changes are headed our way come 2016 – a least in how information is shared.

For some time now, I’ve seen print and online articles predicting that the era of popular information sources such as newspapers and magazines was coming to an end. Printed books, too, are foretold to suffer a similar fate. Most of these stories say the end will effectively come for these forms of information “in five years.” In all these cases, the culprit for these demises is pegged as the growing popularity of the World Wide Web.

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But now, it seems even the Internet is headed towards replacement. At a recent media summit, one market observer loudly proclaimed that the “web is dead.” Within five years, said this analyst, the Internet will be replaced with customized apps as the primary way for individuals to get their information about what’s going on in the world.

So can all these forms of information really just disappear by 2016? While you can never say never in this increasingly changing world of ours, I seriously doubt it. Although I agree that apps will only get bigger in the coming years, I don’t think they alone will cause all other forms of information to disappear. More likely, each will have its own niche of followers for many years to come – certainly going beyond five years ahead.

Still, it will be interesting to see how ag retailers and others within the agricultural community adjust their business models as the way information is shared with the rest of the world.

At the very least, we all have five more years to plan for this scenario . . .

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