The only way to move closer to the Netflix, Google, and Apple tiers of industry is by tapping into the new data abundance and using it to peek in to the future. But people and companies won’t stop making predictions. What will the next 20 years bring? The expected jetpacks and flying cars haven’t arrived, at least not in a mainstream way. Eventually, the iPhone and the Android, and the smartphone revolution, for which the internet was the real killer app, pushed Nokia out of the device business. Those monochrome screens and lack of browser and camera are barely remembered today. Mobile internet? Before that was a thing, the Nokia 3310 was cutting-edge cellphone tech, and the game Snake was what passed for a killer app. The deal never happened, and Google has since become both a verb and a $1 trillion company. Meanwhile, in 1999, Google’s founders unsuccessfully tried to sell the company to owners of the search engine Excite for as little as $750,000. Remember pioneering search engine AltaVista? Or Inktomi, which briefly dominated search and once had a market cap of about $25 billion? Most internet sessions started in those places. Or there’s the case of internet search in the dial-up years. The $150 billion company, now on its third business model, has been both the disruptor and the disrupted. Since then, Netflix has evolved into a tech giant and content studio with more than 150 million subscribers worldwide. Initially unable to see the riches ahead, its founders tried and failed to sell the company to the now defunct Blockbuster Video for $50 million. In 2000, Netflix was a money-losing DVD rental-by-mail service with just 300,000 subscribers.

Even companies now perceived as the smartest on the block once looked shortsighted. To underscore just how much the world can change, examine a few examples from the past 20 years in which huge transformations created disruption and opportunity in different industries. But the lesson is timeless in the business world: Executives focused on the next quarter, or the next year, may completely miss the disruption heading their way. This sentiment has been repeated in some form by the likes of Bill Gates and Arthur C. This difficulty leads many to overestimate the rate of change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. Getting your arms around progress or even predicting it can be like embracing smoke. The pace of change is staggering in and of itself, but try measuring it. Other Insights Data Abundance, Disruption, and Innovation

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