Digital Disruption

There is a lot of talk about the “Digital Disruption” occurring in a variety of industries and the impact that it is happening.  Examples are all over the place and include:

• Music.  The introduction and proliferation of MP3 formatted files caused a tremendous shift not only to the recording industry, but to retail stores as well.  Whereas there once used to be multiple “record shops” almost adjacent to each other, they are now few and far between.
• Movies.  The movie industry fought the digital delivery of movies tooth and nail and yet Netflix is now the largest consumer of bandwidth in the world.  Depending upon which report you read during Prime Time in the United States it exceeds 50% of all network traffic (spam included).
• Software.  There used to be a lot of computer stores that stocked row after row of games and utilities and other packages that you could purchase and run on your computer at home.  The vast majority of software delivery currently occurs through downloading the application over the Internet.  No more manufacturing costs associated with the product anymore.
• Books. Lots of disruption in this area as people purchase Kindles, Kobos and other eBook readers to consume their literature.  While sales in digital form have not outpaced sales in traditional formats, that time is quickly approaching.

The items listed above are very transformative in nature in that an existing industry no longer looks the same after the disruption has occurred.  There are, however, disruptions that occur that don’t change the industry so much as they change the perception of the industry or just increase the user satisfaction with the industry or company.

Let’s go back to Books for a moment.  When Amazon came along they made a significant impact on the publishing industry by giving people the opportunity to browse and purchase a huge selection of books, a selection so large that your local bookstore was unable to match the breadth of offering.  But here is one of the things that you may not know.  Not all of the books that you could order from Amazon were actually “real” books.  A number of the books were printed “on demand”.  You order the book, the book gets printed and then shipped to you.  A print run of one.  All you need is the digital image of the book and you can print it.

The recent advances in 3D printing have the potential to impact people in ways they never knew.  Imagine going to a parts store, a really small parts store, for a particular part for your dishwasher.  They have the “part”, but it will take 15 minutes to make it for you.  Or, for those more adventurous, you download the plans off the Internet and make it yourself.

We have a lot of things at our fingertips:  video, music, books, software.  Why not parts?  Granted plastic parts will be the easiest, but you honestly don’t believe that the process and the evolution of “printing” is just going to stop with plastic, do you?  Carbon fiber?  Soft metals?  Harder metals?  A complete fabrication plant in a box?  Food?  No, that one is already coming.