When we see hi-tech companies ranging from Amazon to Apple reporting record results in a time of economic chaos, we must dig deeper into their differentiators than merely the fact that they give the market what it wants. This week, Apple reported a record June quarter, with revenue of $59.7bn. Amazon trumped that with $88.9bn, up a lockdown-popping 40% on the year before.
It’s not just that these are the producers and distributors of some of the world’s most in-demand products. During the largest anti-trust hearings the US Congress has held in half a century, Apple CEO Tim Cook made much of the fact that Apple does not lead a single market in which it operates.
This was, of course, a lesson in disingenuousness, given the dominance of the App Store. His argument: it’s not the company’s biggest revenue generator. That honour goes to the iPhone, which, in turn, is only the number three smartphone globally, behind Samsung and Huawei.
But amid his dissembling approach to facts — he claimed ludicrously that the company’s App Store required its own apps to abide by the same rules as third-party apps — Cook hit on a fundamental truth: that Apple is in a war for skills.
Any organisation that wants to operate at the cutting edge of technology and market share must also be at the cutting edge of skills. In an era when digital transformation is accelerating due to the demands of a new way of working, learning and entertaining, this has become a critical demand.
It also offers a clue to why SA seems to have fallen so far behind in digital transformation of anything from government services to getting a credit card account sorted out (try to cancel your credit card today and see how many steps it takes).
Morné Laubscher, chief technology officer of the local office of UK-based infrastructure and service company Logicalis — owned by SA tech group Datatec — put it neatly into perspective during a conversation with Business Times this week.“The industry in general is in dire need of modern skills to drive the adoption of technology. We simply don’t have enough people with those skills.”
Part of the issue is that the old-timers who act as the gatekeepers of skills development and employment can’t relate to the thinking of a new generation of young and innovative students and work-seekers. “I’ll give you a very rudimentary example,” said Laubscher.
‘Everything as a service’
“We’ve got a data scientist in our business who is 24 years old and he’s working on amazing artificial intelligence neural networks projects with one of our customers. I would never in my life be able to think about problems the way he would think about a problem. I’m constrained by how I grew up: I started with a monochrome computer and I went up through the ranks. He grew up in a world filled with devices that have data readily available, and where you can access everything at the push of a button.
“These individuals don’t care where the data lives, or where it comes from, or how the systems look that drive them. They just want access to the data, because that’s assumed. In this Microsoft future world and Cisco future world, where we’re talking about everything as a service, with these democratised platforms that can be consumed as a service, the new focus needs to be on the use case, the output, the business problem, and how you apply a string of technologies quickly and efficiently to address that use case or business problem. That, in the end, gives you the digital outcome and digital transformation success.”
Laubscher also has an original perspective on why older techies flounder in this environment: “A lot of the older people in the industry, like myself, have this mindset of still understanding where everything comes from and we are focused on that. The youngsters have a completely different, modern way of looking at things and what they are able to achieve, because they’re not bogged down by this historic insight.”
Does this mean there’s no hope for the old-timers?
In truth, historic insight is still critical to understanding the many fundamentals of business. And the cynical may well still invoke the legendary line from a PJ O’Rourke book title, Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut. Tim Cook certainly proved that in the US Congress this week.
• Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za
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