Boundless

4Distribution: Decentralizing Technologies | Remote = Local | Edges > Centers

“The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.”

—Anne Fadiman (1997, p. vii)

In a connected world, business can take place wherever is most convenient or local to the customer. The continuous evolution of technologies toward democratization and decentralization requires businesses to apply the same mindset in their relationships and interactions with their customers and their employees.

COVID-19 and the Definition of Normal

When historians in the future look back on the early years of the 21st century we wonder what they will make of the impact of COVID-19 and the year 2020. Will they see it as an event that changed everything? Or as an event of not much significance except for the tragic loss of life? Or perhaps they will see it as an accelerator of change that was already on its way?

Unsurprisingly, we are in the third camp here. Well before 2020 we had been tracking the growth and evolution of an array of technologies (among them e-commerce, content streaming, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, cloud-based computing, mobile technologies, autonomous vehicles, telemedicine, the blockchain, and the distributed web) that seemed ripe to transform multiple industries and many parts of our lives, some that were already well on the way to doing so. We also saw that the overwhelming tendency of these technologies was, and is, to support decentralization ...