Jim Harris

by Jim Harris

A staggering 47.4 million Americans quit their job in 2021

In November, 4.5 million quit, the highest number ever recorded since the government began tracking it 20 years ago. “It’s not the great resignation,” says pollster Frank Luntz. “It’s the great rethink. We are reexamining who we are. What our priorities are. What we want for the future.”

“Telling workers they have to go back to work, when they have decided that they don’t want to work at work is a mistake,” warns Luntz.

What is Driving This Shift?

Abbey Eisenlauer of Conversate Labs and Luntz conducted focus groups with people who had quit their jobs. Their goal was to gain a deeper understanding of what’s driving this widespread phenomenon. They uncovered three key findings:

1. Senior leaders are not listening to employees’ anxieties and concerns. Leaders want to go back to a pre-pandemic normal. But it’s not normal for employees anymore.

2. It’s beyond compensation. Employees want work-life balance and work-life choices.

3. Workers are rethinking their personal priorities and thinking about their families.

“Corporate America doesn’t get it,” says Luntz. “The CEO, CIO and CFO doesn’t understand the hopes, dreams and, most importantly, the anxiety and fears of the average worker — and it’s going to come back to bite them.”

People are quitting when they don’t have a say in their work arrangements, or their values conflict with the company culture.

A survey of 3,000 employees at top tier companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Google, JPMorgan and Microsoft by the app Blind, asked workers if they would prefer to permanently work from home or get a $30,000-a-year raise. The results were surprising — 64% said they wanted to continue working at home.

In a Bankrate Job Seeker study, 56% of U.S. workers said flexible working hours and remote work are a priority. And more than half of respondents believe their lifestyle and work life balance needs to change.

Many companies are ordering people to come back to the office but employees have become accustomed to working from home. If a company forces this group to return to the office, 50% will immediately get another job or begin looking for one, research shows.

Before the pandemic, the average American employee spent five work weeks a year commuting — a staggering 200 hours a year stuck in traffic or on transit. Is there nothing better that we can do with our time?

“There are people who want to work at home and there are people who want to work in the office,” notes Eisenlauer. “But most important is they want to have a say in what their work environment, schedule and location is going to be.”

Gaping Empathy Deficit

People want to be heard. To retain people, managers must have a two-way dialogue with employees. Companies need to focus on communication and training for managers according to Eisenlauer.

Reject One Size Fits All: Many employees want to return to work. But for those, for example, who are immune system compromised or need the flexibility to look after a family member, working remotely is the best solution.

Recognize Demographic Differences: Baby Boomers dominate the c-suite of large firms. By contrast, 50% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of millennials and Gen Zs. These demographics have profoundly different outlooks on work, life and work-life balance.

We’re living in a new, fundamentally transformed work world but many corporate leaders are stuck using an old pre-pandemic play book. They need to adopt a new philosophy — one that is as flexible and agile as the workforce leaders say they want.

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By Jim Harris

Toronto’s Innovative Green Condo Financing

A Verve by Tridel SBM FALL 2010 2008 study sponsored by the US Green Building Council shows that green buildings cost on average 2.5 per cent more on construction, but generate more than ten times that amount over the lifetime of the building in reduced energy and operating costs. So going green costs a little more up front and saves a lot on the back end.

In Toronto, a staggering 90 per cent of all new residential construction is condominiums. So if you want to make Toronto housing more energy efficient to combat climate change then condos are the place to start. That’s where the Toronto Atmospheric Fund (TAF) came in. TAF was created in 1992 by Toronto City Council and given a $23 million endowment. Its’ mission: to invest in developing cutting-edge energy efficiency solutions to fight climate change.

Condo developers hadn’t really embraced cutting edge energy efficient solutions, because of the classic problem of split incentives: The builder bore the incremental cost while buyers got the benefit of lower operating costs over the lifetime of the unit. Condo developers worried that if they added the cost of green features into condos they’d loose price sensitive buyers.

So, in 2005 the TAF and Tridel pioneered the Green Condo Loan Program – financing to pay for energy efficiency upgrades so
that a new green condo used 25% less energy than the Canadian average. Upgrades included heat-recovery ventilation, better insulation, high-efficiency heating and cooling systems and Energy Star appliances that would be ultimately be paid for out of utility savings enjoyed by the buyers.

These upgrades cost up to $3,000 per unit and Tridel typically builds 200 to 300 units in a development. So the upgrades added up to $1,000,000 to the price of a typical new development. With the TAF loan paying for the bulk of the upgrades, the purchase price was kept competitive – and TAF rolled the loans into the condo corporation once owners took possession. Th e loans were designed so that the monthly dollar savings from energy efficiency were greater that the loan payments – so the result was cash flow positive for a new owner from the first month on.

Adding up the Wins
The program was a major win for condo buyers because:

1. They got a unit with $3,000 of green extras included in the purchase price for free;
2. The energy savings were greater than the monthly loan payments;
3. After seven years when the loans were paid off , all the operating savings accrued directly to the owners;
4. Owners were insulated from energy prices rise – which are inevitable. As prices rise, their savings increase; and
5. Green buildings yield higher occupancy; premium rents, and higher re-sale prices.

It was a win for the developer because they got to market a green product, which these days is hot with young condo purchasers. And, it was a win for environment because it accelerated the adoption of more energy efficient buildings in Toronto.

The initial program was so successful that today Tridel has developed eight million square feet of green condos making the company the largest provider of green high-rise residential buildings in Canada. TAF has since made green loans to other condo developers including Monarch, Daniels and TAS DesignBuild.

Minto, another large condo developer, saw the benefit of green condos and carried the financing charges on its own books. The reason: The “sales velocity of green buildings is much better than the average market,” says Andrew Pride, Vice President, Minto Green.

TAF’s pioneering role eventually helped to change the market: green condos became the de facto new norm in Toronto, to a point where green developers began complaining about having to engage in the financing of the green costs. They argued that Toronto City Council should just create a level playing field and require all new condos in the city to be 25 per cent more energy efficient, then developers could include the upgrades in the purchase price. Energy efficiency would become the new minimum standard for Toronto condos.

So on February 1, 2010, the City of Toronto adopted the Green Building Standard. To receive a building permit after this date any new development has to be 25% more efficient than the Canadian average. But the city didn’t stop there: it created an incentive for developers to achieve even greater energy savings. If a developer voluntary builds new units that are 35 per cent more energy efficient than the Canadian average, the City will rebate part of the fees the city charges the developer.

To be cutting edge in 2010, new green condos are 35 to 40 per cent more energy efficient compared to the national building code. So TAF and Tridel’s pioneering effort has resulted in Toronto becoming a leader in green condos. In hindsight, achieving a 25 per cent energy efficiency gain wasn’t difficult. Green upgrades also include more air tight units, energy efficient windows, low volatile organic compound (VOC) paints resulting in better air quality, low-fl ow faucets, showerheads, and dual fl ush toilets and tying into Toronto’s Deep Lake Water Cooling (DLWC).

DLWC reduces energy use by 90 per cent compared to traditional air conditioning systems: Water drawn from deep in Lake Ontario is at 4°C. It’s pumped to downtown; the cold is extracted through heat exchangers to cool buildings in the downtown core attached to the system. And then the 70,000 gallons a minute are sent on to serve as the source for Toronto’s drinking water.

Ultimately all this has been of benefit to developers because research shows that 80 per cent of Canadian consumers want to deal with a company that offers green products and services – and 41 per cent will change their brand because of sustainability features.

Condo buyers are typically younger, and the younger you are the greater the predisposition is that you’ll be concerned about environmental issues. Given that over half of all greenhouse gas emissions in Toronto are due to buildings, TAF and Tridel’s pioneering work is very important to the environment and shows how industry-lead green initiatives can transform markets.

Jim Harris is a futurist & professional speaker. On Twitter, @JimHarris was the most influential personal account for CES 2022. You can email him at jim@jimharris.com

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By Jim Harris

By 2030, digital infrastructure will be 100 times more energy efficient.

At the Huawei Global Analyst Summit 2022, Huawei released its Green Development 2030 report. ICT demand and use will grow 100-fold by 2030: general computing will increase 10-fold while AI computing power will increase 500-fold.

Due to climate crisis, CO2 emissions must be constrained and cut, so technologists are challenged to make ICT 100 times more energy efficient by 2030.

Good News
If you’re thinking, “It’s impossible to improve the energy efficiency of technology 100-fold,” look at the improvements from 2010-2020:

Image source https://www.dw.com/en/data-centers-energy-consumption-steady-despite-big-growth-because-of-increasing-efficiency/a-60444548

Internet traffic grew 1,600% from 2010 to 2020, yet data centre energy use barely increased at all (see graph).

Energy efficiency improvements for servers, storage devices, network switches and data centre infrastructure, have kept electricity use flat despite exponential increases in demand.

Global data centres used 200-250 TWh of electricity in 2020, about 1% of global electricity demand; this, however, excludes energy used for cryptocurrency mining, which was ~100 TWh in 2020.

Shift to Hyperscale Has Increased Efficiency
There has been a profound shift in IT from traditional company owned data centers to the cloud and hyperscale cloud providers. Hyperscale computing data centers have been designed with efficiency in mind so are far more energy efficient.

Image source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/186992/global-derived-electricity-consumption-in-data-centers-and-telecoms/

Digitalization Enables Decarbonization
Technology is the key to increasing efficiency and reducing carbon emissions in other industries. While the ICT will account for less than 2% of carbon emissions globally in 2030, it will be essential in increasing efficiency in other industries, enabling them to lower their CO2 emissions by 20%, according to analysis by Global Enabling Sustainability Initiative (GeSI).

Image source: Green Development 2030

Three Prong Strategy
1) Improving the energy efficiency of digital infrastructure 100-fold
2) Expanding renewable energy sources
3) Enabling green development and digitalization across industries

Declining Cost of Renewable Energy

Moore’s Law posited by Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors on a CPU would double every 18-24 months while remaining at a constant price point. This can apply to any technology.

Wright’s Law: that for every cumulative doubling of units produced there will be a constant percentage cost decrease. It’s also known as the learning curve.

Image source: https://twitter.com/skorusARK/status/1309225391723294721/photo/1

Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law are driving the relentless and inevitable improvements in technology and energy efficiency and the declining cost curves for solar power and battery storage.

Huawei predicts that energy storage with grow 20X from 17GW in 2020 to 358GW in 2030.

The exponential increase in solar and wind will be coupled with an exponential increase in storage technology to balance the grid.

Huawei’s Smart PV technology is integrated into the Qinghai Solar Park a 2.2GW plant (the largest in the world) that is generating 5 billion kWh/year. The insight is “using bits to manage watts.”

Biggest Source of New Energy?
What is the biggest source of new energy in America since 1975? The answer will surprise you. It’s energy efficiency!

If the US had the same energy intensity of 1975 (energy to GDP), the nation would require 2.5 times more energy, notes Amory Lovin’s, the Founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and America’s leading energy efficiency guru. Energy efficiency should be the first focus. Lovins estimates that holistic, integrated design thinking of systems could cut energy use by an additional 66 to 75%.

Source: Amory Lovins & Rocky Mountain Institute

Tackling the Challenge Head On
Global carbon emissions were 35 billion tons in 2020. Four sectors (power, industrial, transportation and buildings) represent 94% of all emissions:

Source: IEA and BP’s Energy Outlook

Digital technology can help these sectors cut carbon emissions by up to 40% in these four sectors, according to Green Development 2030.

Jim Harris is a futurist & professional speaker. On Twitter, @JimHarris was the most influential personal account for CES 2022. You can email him at jim@jimharris.com

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Tesla is worth more than the top twelve legacy automakers added together!

By Jim Harris

Tesla’s market capitalization (value) is greater than the combined value of General Motors, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Nissan, Daimler (Mercedes Benz), Hyundai, Kia, BMW and Renault as of January 2022.

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) market share among passenger vehicle sales globally has soared during the pandemic:

Source: Viktor Irle & EV volumes

Traditional gas-powered car sales slumped. General Motors was the largest car company globally (until 2008) and sold the most cars in the US (until 2021):

Source: Statista, GM

Factors Driving the Shift
Supply Chain Paralysis
The drivetrain of a traditional gas car has more than 2,000 moving parts. During the pandemic, supply chain challenges have bedeviled auto makers. Missing a single part means, the vehicle can’t be produced.

“Lean manufacturing” was introduced in 1991 as a management philosophy. Since then, companies have consistently reduced inventory on-hand instead opting for just-in-time delivery. The theory works perfectly unless of course, the entire supply chain is paralyzed.

Most traditional auto makers have outsourced production to key suppliers. Traditional car companies have simply become assembly plants.

Tesla has two advantages over traditional car companies: i) an EV has only 20 moving parts not 2,000 so the vehicle design is significantly simpler. With fewer parts, production is not as vulnerable to supply chain disruption and ii) Tesla is vertically integrated, meaning it produces the vast majority of the parts required itself.

Critical Semiconductor Shortage
There are up to 1,400 semi conductor chips in a new gas-powered car. These control everything from windshield wipers to brakes. If you’re missing a single chip, you can’t complete the car. In 2021, global car production was cut by 11.3 million vehicles as a result of semiconductor shortages, costing the industry more than $110 billion.

As a result, the average new US car price hit $47,000, the highest ever, according to Kelley Blue Book and TrueCar (up from $40,000 in 2020). Used car prices surged almost 50% in 2021 to $30,595, according to BNEF.

Perfect Tsunami: Multiple Drivers
i) At the start of the pandemic in 2020 auto makers cut semiconductor orders in line with lean thinking. Chip makers allocated product capacity to other industries.

Semi conductors are used in thousands of modern products. Some have high value, and some can cost less than $1. Many of the 1,400 semi conductors in cars are cheap, and low margin for semi conductor companies.

ii) The pandemic drove an increase in PC, notebooks, and electronics sale because of remote working. These products contain high-value chips, so get production priority.

iii) Two companies control 70% of the market: TSMC (Taiwan, 53%) and Samsung (South Korea, 17%). The next three firms bring that to 90%. New fabrication (fab) plants cost billions of dollars and take years to bring online. So, the crisis will continue.

iv) Huawei and other Chinese companies began stockpiling semiconductors once the US announced banning them from using US designed chips. This reaction increased demand and cut supply. The unintended consequence has boomeranged back, crippling US car companies.

v) A factory fire in a Japanese semiconductor foundry in March 2021 that was a major supply to the US auto industry further constrained supply.

Some analysts look at Tesla’s future product predictions with incredulity: 20 million cars a year by 2030.

Source: Tesla

I wouldn’t bet against Tesla. It’s the old car companies that are in trouble. Auto firms traditionally took six years to bring out a new model: that’s from research to concept, then design, engineering, manufacturing to launch.

They are now being challenged to change not just their products, but their key processes: from gas to electric vehicles, from traditional manufacturing methods to robotics to keep up with Tesla (creating conflict with unions), from old suppliers to new ones (i.e., batteries). They’re being challenged to change everything. And all this at twice the speed. They’re being asked to build new planes, while flying and designing them.

Electrification of the $10 trillion a year transportation market is highly disruptive. I predict that at least two of the top twelve traditional car companies will cease to exist in the next five years. They will either go bankrupt, be bought, or merged.

Jim Harris is a futurist & professional speaker. On Twitter, @JimHarris was the most influential personal account for CES 2022. You can email him at jim@jimharris.com

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A staggering 81% of firms have accelerated their move to the cloud as a result of the pandemic, according to a Devo Technology study.

By Jim Harris

The rise of cloud is dramatically disrupting the on-premises (on-prem) IT data center providers.

Over the past decade, the average annual growth for data center spending was 2% while for cloud services (IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud) it was 52% notes Synergy. Data center spending is now in decline.

The cloud market grew faster in 2020 than in 2019, despite the steepest economic contraction in modern history. The reason is increased demand fueled by pandemic driven lockdowns and employees working from home, notes Deloitte.

The Unthinkable

At the outbreak of COVID-19 in March of 2020, many people believed the impact of the pandemic would only last for two weeks. And then it was two months. Now we’re coming up to two years and with the Delta variant that is very contagious and with the threat of emerging new variants — what if we never get out of this cycle? Imagine that COVID-19 becomes seasonal like the flu where each year we’re encouraged to get vaccinated against the latest variant strain.

Now that employees are used to working from home, will we move away from this trend? Dell doesn’t think so. It has 165,000 employees and expects that 50% of its staff will never work in the office again. They may come in once a month for a meeting, but will not be in the office full time.

Cloud Predicted Growth

IT spending on cloud providers at the start of 2021 was predicted to rise by 30% according to Deloitte, but the growth has exceeded expectations for the first half of the year. Global growth of the cloud could hit 33% for 2021, according to Duncan Stewart, director of research for Deloitte who forecasts global tech predictions. An April 2020 survey of 50 CIOs found that respondents expected to see the proportion of total workload done on-prem drop from 59% in 2019 to 38% in 2021.

Because of this, enterprise resource planning vendors are encouraging clients to go to the cloud notes Stewart and that will continue.

Complacency Kills

In 2016, I was leading a strategic planning exercise with an executive team at one of the largest IT consulting firms globally with $10 billion a year in sales. In preparing for the event, the president said he was excited with 8% projected growth for the following year and believed the business plan didn’t need tweaking.

I began my session highlighting the analysts’ consensus, at the time, was the cloud would experience 75% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) for the next five years. My question to shake the executive team out of complacency was “How does 8% on-prem growth look now, compared to the predicted growth of cloud being almost 10 times faster?”

As an aside the actual CAGR from 2016 to 2020 has been only 42%. But 42% was still 5X the growth rate my client was happy with for on-prem.

Executives who are rooted in their existing business model have a tough time seeing other ways of working. How glaring do the signs have to be before leaders wedded to their current way of working recognize that the market has moved?

Once a trend is in place, a black swan event like the pandemic, can spell the end of an old way of working. In just one decade, the cloud has overtaken on-prem data centers. COVID spells the beginning of the end for the old, legacy business model of on-prem data centers

Jim Harris is the author of Blindsided. Follow him at @JimHarris or email jim@jimharris.com.

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CEOs Rate Cyber Risk the #1 Threat for Organizations

By Jim Harris

With millions of people working remotely in North America due to the pandemic, the number of vulnerabilities in IT systems has increased exponentially. As a result, cyber crime grew significantly during the pandemic. In a 2021 CEO survey by KPMG, CEOs rated cyber security risk as the top threat.

Ransomware has exploded into the consciousness of North American business, with high profile cases like Colonial Pipeline, creating gas shortages in the Eastern US, but most ransomware attacks never become public knowledge.

The US Treasury has tied $5.2 billion in bitcoin transactions to US ransomware payments. Global estimates are $20 billion and are predicted to grow more than 20X over the next 10 years. But the ransom paid, however, is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of cost to organizations. According to McAffe, cyber crime is a $1 trillion a year problem globally.

Cyber security is one of the fastest growing areas of IT, which in turn has resulted in there being more than three million unfilled cyber security positions globally.

“There are only two types of organizations, those that have been hacked, and those that don’t know they have been hacked.”

This used to be one of my favourite sayings of John Chambers, when he was CEO of Cisco.

i3 columnist Jim Harris with Cisco CEO John Chambers at CES in 2014

Phishing

Most cyber attacks begin with phishing. What is phishing you ask? You get an email from your bank telling you that your account has been hacked and urging you to immediately change your password, providing a convenient link to the login page. When you login you are actually not logging into the bank, you’re on the hacker’s site which looks like the bank and you’re providing them with your account and login details.

Then there’s spear phishing. That’s where the hackers research you – and the email you received is far more customized and sophisticated. John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair in her 2016 presidential run, was the victim of spear phishing. All Clinton’s emails were leaked as a result – arguably costing her the election. Podesta even reached out to an IT staffer to ask if he should reset his password, and the staffer replied that it was legitimate.

Finally, there are whaling attacks. That’s where your CEO or another senior executive in your organization emails you and instructs you to urgently change your password or download a file and open it.

Ransomware, phishing, cyber crime . . . what can organizations do to reduce risk? Here’s the top ten strategies:

Top Ten Risk Reduction Strategies
1. Training, training, training
2. Multi Factor Authentication (MFA)
3. Password Management
4. Automatic Updating of Software
5. Antivirus & Antimalware software
6. Backups. Both cloud based and on prem
7. Steps to Protect Against Identity Theft
8. Use of AI to detect irregular behaviour on the network
9. Insurance
10. Ongoing training

The Human Factor: Training
While IT professionals will have a bias for technological approaches to mitigate cyber risk, there needs to be more focus on the people aspect. “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” So goes the expression. Every person in your organization must be trained in cyber security awareness. And the training needs to be ongoing.

A CEO told me how every single employee in his company had been trained to identify phishing threats. Two weeks after the education sessions, the training company ran a phishing exercise and 20% of employees keyed in their login and password. So training must be ongoing. Additionally, any third-party, such as a supplier, who can login and access your systems must also have ongoing training.

During the pandemic hospitals have been shut down by ransomware. Cyber crime has become deadly business. So now business will have to take it very seriously indeed.

Jim Harris is the author of the Blindsided which focuses on disruptive innovation. It is published in 80 countries worldwide and is a #1 international bestseller. You can follow him on Twitter @JimHarris or email him at jim@jimharris.com

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The Future of Augmented Reality

By Jim Harris 

By 2025, the global market for augmented reality (AR) will be $300 billion with 1.2 billion users, but not in the way you think. 

What is Augmented Reality (AR)?  

Ikea has an AR application that lets you see what a room would look like with an Ikea couch in it. The reality (a photo of your home) is augmented with an image of an Ikea couch. This is a great example of how AR can be used in retail. 

One of the most basic mobile AR apps are the Instagram filters people overlay on selfies. The ultimate AR app of course is Pokémon Go. It was released in 2016 and was downloaded more than 500 million times globally by the end of its first year! That grew to 1.1 billion downloads in 2020. Critical insights from Pokémon are:

Specialized Equipment vs. Smartphones: Millions vs. Billions

If AR requires special equipment like an Oculus headset (pictured), the market will be limited because 1) people don’t carry a specialized headset around with them at all times, but they do carry their smartphones; 2) It’s predicted that by 2025 53 million AR headsets will be sold a year. By comparison that more than a 1.5 billion smartphones will be sold in 2025, according to IDC; 3) the average selling price (ASP) of a consumer AR headset is currently $800 and it is predicted to fall to $500 by 2025. Unless you’re a serious gamer, or have a specialized corporate use case, smartphone apps will dominate AR. 

 

Bringing Museums to Life  

Dali Lives is a way for visitors to interact with Salvador Dali at the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida. The system uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer questions that museum goers might ask. Everything that Dali ever wrote, all his interviews were analyzed by the AI. It determines the most likely answer Dali would have given to any question he might have been asked. Dali’s image was extracted from photographs and video and his voice, accent and intonation all come from audios of the artist. 

“Dali Lives” is a large stand alone display with speakers (left). Now imagine that rather than this display answering questions, using 5G and GPS you could listen to the AI on your earbuds via your smartphone as you walk around the museum. Dali would be serving as your personal tour guide telling you about the exhibits, but also answering your questions about any piece of art that you were curious about – using the vast reservoir of the world’s knowledge about Dali. 

How engaging would a museum be for children learning about art history? Literally art would come to life! Think about all the applications for museums, historical sites, tourism and education in general. 

Now here’s a specialized application that uses a AR headset: 

AR in the OR: Transforming Surgical Visualization 

Dr Christopher Monely, the co-founder of MediVis, spoke at CES in 2017 during the Verizon keynote. MediVis uses augmented reality and 5G to take big data and using 3D modeling and AI, dramatically improve surgical outcomes. Many surgeries today are performed the same way they were 30 years ago: blindly. 

Among the most frequently performed neuro surgical procedures is the freehand ventriculostomy. The surgeon drills into the patient’s skull, determining the angle by eyeballing it. There’s no consideration for the immense variation between individual patients. Unsurprisingly 40% of procedures go wrong and 20% of patients have serious complications. This procedure requires that the angle, width of hole, and drilling depth are ALL EXACTLY right. 

All patients have a detailed digital map of their brain from CT and MRI scans. This data has been historically trapped on 2D monitors. Patient data can now be transformed into actionable intelligence. Using AR, 5G and cloud computing, the data can be modeled in 3D so that the surgeon wearing AR goggles can see all the blood vessel and brain landmarks perfectly perform the procedure. The technology allows surgeons to radically rethink the procedures making it safer and simpler. 

By 2025, AR combined with 5G, AI, cloud computing and mobile will allow for an infinite array of new applications and business models to deliver more real-world value in retail, eCommerce, education, tourism and health to billions of people. 

Jim Harris is the author of the Blindsided which focuses on disruptive innovation. It is published in 80 countries worldwide and is a #1 international bestseller. You can follow him on Twitter @JimHarris or email him at jim@jimharris.com

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Inexpensive solar disrupts traditional power producers

By Jim Harris

Solar power is the cheapest source of new electricity globally. In April 2021, the world record low bid of 1.04 cent per kWh of solar power was announced for 600MW of solar power in Saudi Arabia — that is enough energy to power 100,000 homes. Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) are for 20 or more years and include both capital and operating costs.

This is bad news for traditional power producers globally. It costs more than a cent to run an existing gas, coal or nuclear power plant. In other words, the combined capital (CAPEX) and operating (OPEX) expense of some solar is now cheaper than the operating expenses of traditional power plants. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the cost to operate nuclear power plants are two to five cents per kWh; for coal it is two to four cents; and for natural gas it is between four and ten cents.

Solar and wind power are the cheapest source of electricity for two thirds of the world’s population, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). The economies in these countries represent 72% of the world’s GDP and 85% of global power demand.

Looking back, the price of solar power has plummeted from $77 per Watt in 1977 to just 12¢/Watt in 2020. This stunning decline of 640X is head spinning. Solar power has been declining in cost 18% annually since 2010.

Most traditional electricity utilities have been slow to embrace solar. In 2000, the IEA predicted that the world would have installed a total of 18 Gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity by 2020. The IEA is the body that advises world governments and electric utilities on future trends. By the end of 2020, the world had installed just shy of 900 GW of solar power. The decline in solar prices has driven cumulative solar installations surpassing what the IEA predicted.

Wright’s Law

Wright’s Law states that for every cumulative doubling of units produced, costs will fall by a constant percentage. Think of it as the law of learning, or the experience curve. For solar power it works out to a 30% decline in cost for each doubling of cumulative production. As solar installations continue to be built, costs will decline, resulting in even more solar installations.

Here is a staggering statistic: more energy falls on the earth from the sun in a single hour than all energy used in all countries in an entire year.

According to a new report released by Carbon Tracker in April of 2021, by the mid 2030s, solar and wind power will have pushed fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) completely out of the electricity sector. Given the rapid rise in electrification of the $10 trillion transportation market, fossil fuels will be pushed out of transportation as well.

It appears the decade of disruption for electric utilities will be between 2020 to 2030.

Jim Harris is the author of Blindsided. Follow him at @JimHarris or email: jim@jimharris.com

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How Zoom Beat Huge, Established Videoconferencing Players

By Jim Harris

In December of 2019, Zoom had 10 million daily users. From April to June 2020, the app was downloaded 300 million times – 200 million times from Google Play and 94 million times on Apple’s App Store, shattering records for the most downloaded non-game app in history. How many companies do you know that increased their customer count by 30X during the pandemic? And look at Zoom’s revenue growth:

Zoom’s Quarterly Revenue

Zoom had the highest growth in brand recognition among American consumers in 2020, according to Morning Consult’s annual study. And Zoom is worth as much as the top seven airlines (by 2019 revenue) COMBINED in March 2021.

How could videoconferencing upstart Zoom crush well established players like Skype (owned by Microsoft) and Cisco’s Webex?

I was in Nepal in 1998 and needed to call back to North America. By telephone, it cost 300 Nepalese Rupees per minute (about $2.50 US). Instead I went to an Internet café, put on a headset and called for just 10 Rupees a minute (8.5 cents). While at the time the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology wasn’t duplexed, I nonetheless predicted that all long distance would be free by 2005 for North American consumers. Skype beat my prediction by 2 years launching in 2003.

In the graph below, VoIP calls (in red) don’t even register until 2005. International long distance for telcos (navy blue) peaked in 2014 and then began to decline. By contrast, VoIP continued exploding. International VoIP calls are now more than 1,200 billion minutes – or 1.2 trillion minutes a year. Important insight: disruption can be a decade or two in the making until the technology matures enough to overwhelm traditional incumbent companies. Think about this: in 1998 US telcos used to make 70% of their profit from long distance calls.

Now here’s the killer stat: Zoom is now providing 3.5 TRILLION minutes of videoconferencing a year (baby blue bar). That’s more than ALL international minutes from all traditional telcos added to all international VoIP minutes — then doubled! And Zoom is doing that all by itself. The VoIP disruption prepared the stage for Zoom’s disruption. (Note: navy blue and red are only international long distance. Zoom’s is domestic and international long distance and local)

Source: TeleGeography, final bar’s data from Zoom

Freemium. Zoom allows users to experience the system with its freemium model. A free account allows a user to host meetings of up to 40 minutes for up to 100 people. That allows individuals working in companies that are locked into existing contracts with WebEx or Skype for Business, to still try Zoom. Zoom founder Eric Yuan said: “Without a freemium product, you’re going to lose the opportunity to let many users test your products.”

Price. In 2008 I was at a Cisco Telepresence demo. The system provided an immersive video conferencing experience – at a cost of $70,000 per location. Fast forward to 2020 when a Zoom Pro account is $20 a month and uses existing hardware (laptop, desktop, or smartphone). Cutting the cost of video communication to almost to zero results in exploding demand. But that’s still not the full story.

Quality. Zoom has worked diligently to have the best possible video and audio experience across a wide array of devices. The system has been designed to be feature rich and customer-centric.

Ease of Use. Zoom has focused on creating a frictionless experience compared to other platforms. You access a meeting with a simple link. No one wants to have to download an .exe file or an app, or to be forced to register for an account. No one wants to be 10 minutes late for a meeting because they were fighting to make the thing work.

Scalability. Zoom was designed from the ground up to scale. It’s built on AWS for the very purpose of being able to serve explosive demand.

Implications
Zoom’s success will accelerate the decline of landlines. The average cost of a home landline in the US is $45 per month. Why would you pay that when can call anywhere in the world via Zoom for $20 a month and have no long distance charges?

What does become more important is bandwidth. If you’re at home in the pandemic with kids who are at school on Zoom, and you have business meetings, bandwidth is key. We’re going to see an increase in bandwidth demands and expectations – connected Ethernet, WiFi and mobile. This, of course, will fuel consumer desire for Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6 and 5G. Welcome to the Zoom revolution.

Jim Harris is the author of the Blindsided which focuses on disruptive innovation. It is published in 80 countries worldwide and is a #1 international bestseller. You can follow him on Twitter @JimHarris or email him at jim@jimharris.com