X
Business

Tech that Gen Y will sweep away

There's a new generation of people, raised in the Internet era, who don't see the need for many of the technology tools that once seemed irreplaceable.
Written by Nick Heath, Contributor
Web 2.0 evangelist Don Tapscott - author of tech titles including Wikinomics and The Digital Economy - is forecasting a "big conflict" in the office, sparked by the generation of 11- to 30-year-olds who are determined to reshape the workplace in their own image.

Talking to silicon.com about his latest book Grown Up Digital, Tapscott laid out five "generational firewalls" that bosses need to tear down if they want to attract the brightest and best of Generation Y.

Here are technologies that are going to soon become obsolete if Generation Y has its way.

Email
"Young people see email as good for sending a thank you letter to an aunt but not much else."

Websites
"The internet is increasingly about building community, not providing content - it offers a way for people to self-organise to create communities. That is why Facebook beat Match.com, why bloggers are beating CNN.com and why Wikipedia is beating Encyclopaedia Britannica."

Datacenters
"They are going to move into the cloud, in much the same way that electricity companies moved away from the practice of having their own power plants onsite during the early days of electricity."

Fixed line phones
"They will be replaced by mobile devices."

The personal computer
"They will be replaced by small always-connected devices with a high degree of mobility. The personal computer was always an oxymoron for me, it's like the idea of personal sex. The purpose of computing is to communicate."

Traditional data processing
"This is headed for the ashcan of history. Everything in a report will have an XML tag called eXtensible Business Reporting Language." [This provides an identifying tag for each piece of information which is computer readable so the machine can understand what data it is handling].

This article was originally posted on silicon.com.

Editorial standards