There is a natural human tendency to assume that the way things are is the way they will always be, and by corollary, that they must have always been that way. One might say that our perspective is a bit narrow, even akin cosmically to the life span of the fruit fly (which is about 30 days).
"Disruption is inevitable."
Having only recently become facile with the current generation of smartphones, I was startled today by an article on Business Insider about the coming obsolescence of smartphones - The End Of The Smartphone Era Is Coming. The author's (Nicholas Carlson) conclusion was partly premised on previews of coming technology attractions from Google and Microsoft but more so on the fundamental premise that "disruption is inevitable."
While I agree with the premise, the difficulty is that all disruptions do not occur on the same timescale. Smartphones may well be obsolete in a few years time, but the fundamental achitecture of the nation's telephone system has been in place for many decades. And the alternating current system of electricity generation and distribution has been with us for over a century.
The trick then is being sensitive to the likely timescale of change in your particular industry, technology or business. Unfortunately, the longer an incumbent technology has been in place (think publishing and recorded music), the more difficult will be the adaptation to disruptive change for its practitioners.
The end is always coming - it's just a matter of time. Or as John Maynard Keynes once said, "In the long run, we are all dead."[1]
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[1] en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
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