The Inexorable Pace of Change
world. Of course, this ability also brings with it new considerations for the consumer. The reliabil- ity of buying from an Internet retailer, the security of making payment, and return policies would all factor into the purchase decision.
1.4 The Inexorable Pace of Change The world today is changing at an ever-faster pace compared even to a few years or a decade ago. Given the rate of change, it’s easy to get lost in just how far technology has advanced in such a short time. For instance, Facebook didn’t exist until 2004, YouTube until 2005, and the iPhone, which has gone through numerous updates, wasn’t unveiled until 2007. Kodak, for decades the producer of the most popular photographic film in the world, stopped marketing film cameras in January 2004 in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. By 2007 it neither manufactured nor licensed any film camera with the Kodak name. The world had truly gone digital. In early 2012, this company, which had been a prominent entry in the Fortune 500 list since that ranking first appeared, was facing bankruptcy.
It is easy to observe how rapidly technologies are advancing and the products they spawn are being developed. High-tech industries in which such rapid changes are occurring and where changes in market share are temporary are termed hypercompetitive. Pro- found changes are occurring all the time in other areas as well. The political maps of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have all changed radically over the past 20 years. The “Arab Spring” of 2011 saw popular uprisings overthrow autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya that had brutally oppressed their citizens for decades. Many observers and
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While most industries have regulations in place, corruption and conflicts of interest still exist in U.S. businesses.
Discussion Questions 1. Can a company today survive in its domestic market by remaining entirely domestic? How would
you rank order the threats it faces from nondomestic companies? 2. How can a company determine where else in the world its products might be in demand and
how tough the competition might be in those markets? 3. Name some of the most global businesses in the world. What do they produce, and how did they
get to be so big and expansive? 4. In the case of La Aurora, the company appeared to have been suddenly overwhelmed by events
that led to its demise. Could it have foreseen any of these events? If so, what might it have done to counter them?