The End of History Illusion

In 2013 a psychology researcher called Daniel Gilbert came up with the great idea of asking 19,000 people a couple of questions. He asked them if they had changed in the last ten years, and if they expected to change in the next ten years.

The results showed that young people, middle-aged people and older people all believed that they had changed a lot in the last ten years, but that they expected to change little in the next ten years. People seem to regard the present as a sort of watershed moment, at which they have finally become the person they really are for the rest of their lives.

Daniel Gilbert called this the ‘End of History Illusion’. For all of us, every day, today is the end of change.

It feels to me like the technology industry has the opposite. I call it the ‘Beginning of History Illusion’. For all of us in the technology industry, every day, today is the beginning of change. The thing that is happening now today, is going to redefine the way we market and sell our solutions. Nothing will be the same. There are many examples, and IoT is one. Nothing will be the same. It’s the beginning of the new world.

But actually this change has been happening for years. To mess up a Churchill quote, we’re not at the beginning. We might be at the end of the beginning. Or the beginning of the middle. Or something.

The impact of IoT on routes to market is significant for sure. But it’s been coming for more than ten years. We just didn’t notice it had started. Until now.

As with most significant change, you’ve got to watch for the shifting tide. It’s too easy to look back in three years’ time and ask ‘When did that happen?’

When did we have more Managed Service Providers, Consultants and Developers in our partner ecosystem than we do resellers? When did hardware vendors like Dell start creating services programs? When did measuring customer influence become more important than measuring sales?

The key takeaway? See it coming. Ask yourself three questions:

What proportion of our partner ecosystem is profiling in the services category?

How does our business engage with service providers, consultants and developers?

What progress are we making towards measurement and reward of customer influence?

The content in this opinion piece is an extract from ‘The Impact of IoT on Technology Routes to Market’, a keynote presentation by Matt Rowland-Jones of bChannels. To read more visit Matt’s webpage here.

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