There were a lot of really interesting comments to my question about retail trends earlier this week. Thanks to all who contributed to the discussion. As I am thinking about how to organize all of these, I am reminded that it is often (always?) a good idea to try to reason from first principles. In other words, what are the underlying characteristic of the Internet that are driving these trends? I intentionally said “Internet” (as opposed to “web”) because I mean for that to be an all encompassing term that includes mobile.
So here is my attempt at a reduced list of characteristics that drive everything else.
The Internet provides
- global
- free (not true yet for mobile, but as first approximation)
- instant (this is the “realtime” part)
- omnipresent (this is “mobile”)
- connected (this is the social bit, the “graph”)
read/write/copy capabilities to everyone.
Here is an example of how these first principles help think about some of the trends mentioned in the retail post. There was a whole discussion around pricing and inventory. The first principles mean that as a shopper I can access pricing at all times, from all places, at no cost, etc. So any meaningful price differences will now always get noticed by at least some customers. Also, my expectations around inventory status are based on my own experiences with something like Facebook or Twitter where status updates propagate instantly. So my tolerance for a store claiming something is in stock when it is not will be incredibly low (non-existant?).
I am not sure yet how useful this will prove in practice, but it has already made for an interesting thought exercise for myself. Will definitely post more about this.
