Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Ramadan 17, 1445 H
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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

From SMAC to DARQ technologies

Stefano Virgilli
Stefano Virgilli
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Innovation has never been faster in recorded history. A traditional assessment for speed of an innovation is the 50 million users mark. It took for instance 64 years for the aviation industry to convince 50 million passengers to sit on an airplane. Slightly faster was the automotive industry, with 50 million car passengers and drivers in 62 years.


Going down the list, the telephone took 50 years to get to 50 million people using it to make calls. The electricity was faster by 4 years, hitting the mark at 46 years after the domestic introduction to families.


Then from 1950 onwards, in the second half of the past century, we started experiencing faster and faster adoption of multiple technologies. For instance, credit cards reached the 50 millionth customer after 28 years from the launch. Television, one of the most widespread technologies of the 1900, took only 22 years to reach 50 million consumers.


When in 1969 ATMs were invented, getting to 50 million users was a ride down the slope. In fact, by 1987 — only 18 years later — ATMs had been visited by the target number of 50 million users.


Computer set a new record in speed, with the 50 millionth customer achieved in only 14 years, paving the road for mobile phones, which took 12 years.


Internet was a bullet train in comparison, with 50 million users in just 7 years, and that’s all, when it comes to technology. The rest of the examples are not really 50 million users for the adoption of an innovation, but rather to measure the reach of a service using one of such technologies. For instance, it took Facebook (computer + Internet + mobile phone) only 4 years to reach 50 million users. Even faster WeChat (Internet + mobile phone), in 1 year. And the ultimate record achiever in terms of speed was Pokemon Go (Internet + mobile phone), the award winning addictive game which reached 50 million users in barely 19 days from the launch.


According to a recent report published by Accenture, it is shown that businesses are now the focus of tech developers to measure growth, as consumer growth has been mastered over the past 100 years.


In other words, it is not such a tough challenge anymore to reach 50 million users, but to reach 50 million businesses is tougher game. Moreover, Businesses have now to deal with the major competitive challenge of a widespread base of tech savvy customers, who expect nothing but perfection.


It has been calculated that if a page on Amazon.com — the world’s most popular online marketplace — would have loaded just one second slower, that could have cost to the company and incredible $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has also calculated that by slowing down a search results page by a mere 400 milliseconds they could lose up to 8 million searches per day. Imagine the monetary loss of not displaying all those adds to the consumers.


Users have grown spoiled with options and perfection is the only standard they accept. Therefore businesses can no longer afford to stay behind the wave of their customers. By the time companies and enterprises became used to serve users across the SMAC channels (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud), clients have already begun demanding for the newest trend: DARQ, short form for Distributed Ledger Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Extended Reality, and Quantum Computing.


Here is where the Accenture’s report loses me a bit. I have voiced out in the past both my infatuation and — subsequently — my denunciation of Blockchain. I remain positive that Distributed Ledger Technology might have a chance to make a moderate impact on society, but back to the 50 million users acquisition, Blockchain has definitely failed to attract a large mass of users.


At the beginning of 2019, only 1 million Smart Contracts were created. A Smart Contract is a programming code that define rules for a transaction to take place. On paper — listening to blockchain enthusiasts — they make perfect sense. And to a certain extent I agree on that.


At a ground level, a Smart Contract sets conditions and allocates tokens, that are then distributed up such conditions being met.


However, a Smart Contract could be as simple as getting the computer to return a value, just for testing the technology. That is what the countless students who ventured in blockchain training over the past few years were merely able to program, and all of those home assignments on blockchain, together with the real Smart Contracts in place, barely exceed 1 million in over a decade since the technology was launched in January 2009.


It is a long way to go to reach 50 million users. Meanwhile, businesses and enterprises have begun investing towards DARQ technologies, in case I was wrong, and the report I am quoting was actually right.


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