I think Geoffrey Colvin is being a bit presumptious when, in his article called "Managing in chaos" in the current issue of Fortune, he says "The hard fact: We are going through a transition that will interest historians centuries from now."
It would certainly have interested futurists from the past. But historians in the future?
If we assume that the rate of technological change continues to increase as it has to date, then today's society will seem pretty stable compared to that of a decade from now, never mind a hundred or two hundred years in the future. In which case the historical interest will more likely be these companies that lasted for almost a century doing pretty much the same thing in the same way . The fact that they went out of business because they couldn't change fast enough will be the most banal aspect of the whole thing.
Posted by Stephen Bronstein at September 26, 2006 11:06 AM