History

We live in a world where everything is just a click away. From watching your favorite movies to ordering your favourite food or any product, a world dominated by algorithms that are capable of keeping you and me hooked for hours. We have certainly come a long way. Business and trade have become so easy. Businesses can now target millions of people all at once.

But was this always the case?

Let's check our history and try to make our way to the present.

Any business or any brand largely depends on the game of supply and demand. In the 18th century, in an age where there were no smartphones neither the internet, the entire route of doing trade was pretty conventional yet time consuming because there was no internet or any fast modes of transport. And due to the lack of the modern day internet, we had information gaps on many different levels, like we didn't knew about all of the businesses in a city. This meant that businesses like for example a coffee shop would get a fair chance in their suburb.

In this age distribution was the major bottleneck instead of creation. We will talk about physical scarcity and geographical monopoly and regional demand in detail in some other article. Also industrialization :D

Rise of the Internet

In the mid 1990s when the internet was getting commercialized, we saw a new boom called the Dot Com Era. In which thousands of companies and brands went online and many new ones were founded as they all wanted to try out this new way of communication. They had no idea as to what it would become in the future.

Venture capitalists were pouring money into any company ending with “.com.” Many of my favourite companies were founded during this period. I'll name two of them - PayPal and eBay ( originally named AuctionWeb ). Now what made these two companies so special was that they opened two entirely new ways of doing the manual processes, i.e. payment processing ( PayPal ) and a marketplace on the internet ( eBay ). These two companies changed how we would use the internet for trade and payments, thus rewriting the entire method of trade among two individuals or two businesses.

Soon we even got social media up and running with Facebook dominating that space and crushing its competitors which changed how we now connect and talk to one another.

Macintosh 128K

Apple made a really big release of its most successful PC of that time called the Macintosh which was later rebranded as Macintosh 128K. Infact Steve Jobs was the person whom I look upto the most as the most influential innovator of that time. Because this Macintosh completely changed the entire domain of personal computers. He popularized design as a core element of Apple's products, wether it was the iPhone, iPad or the MacBook Air.

Present Age and Early Covid

As smartphones became mainstream around 2015 and then in 2019 Covid hit us, followed by lockdowns... Everything changed... again, this is when tech companies ushered in a wave of profits and increase revenue because everyone was in their home surfing the internet, which made brands realise the importance of having an online presence. The realisation was so dramatic that even brands that never planned on going online, had to do it.

Once everything went online, visibility became the new scarcity. We saw an explosion in the number of people making TikToks and Instagram Reels, for example.

Soon the entire business model changed, we now buy most of the stuff online, rather than going to the marketplace for every little thing. This is why it became so important for brands to target their customers, while technology has made it much easier for people and brands to connect to one another, it has also increased the number of competitors that want to target the same subset of people as a particular brand wants to.

I gave the example of shops, particularly coffee shops of the early 1800s. If you look at the shops of today, you will see them competing at every level, wether its giving their customer the best coffee or designing the best ambience for them. They want to gain edge at any level they can.

I believe that the same phenomenon will happen soon when brands realise that in this AI age, the design and feel of their product or their marketing will be the biggest differentiator among their competitors as AI continues to make information synthesis feasible. Also with AI agents planning their journey and doing all the bookings, every business will again try to shift towards something that will make them more Human.

So you can see that technology has almost entirely removed the information gap that used to exist in the pre-internet era. So much so that even I know about every single gaming zones in my city :D

The world is moving faster than ever... what was true yesterday might not be true tomorrow.

Ending notes :

I know I’ve rushed a bit here, tracing the main shifts. But later, we’ll take our time with each stage, seeing how every change shaped the world we live in today.

See you in the next one.

Animesh.