Our unhappy pandemic is fading…slowly…for now. It’s not clear when and how things will be opened up again, but it seems likely that will be starting within a month in the US. Other countries have already started opening up. The impact of the pandemic is historic, but we won’t know all of the details, likely, until the end of the summer. It may well change our lives, our behaviors for a very long time, perhaps for a generation.
What can we now expect for technology? I blogged about the impact of the virus HERE and HERE, but I’m not going to reference these past blogs now. Instead I’ll try to apply what we’ve seen and learned to the rest of 2020.
One thing we know now is that the global economy is terribly vulnerable to a pandemic that is serious enough to pose a risk to life on a broad scale, and for which we have no vaccine or mitigating treatment. Coronavirus alone has created three incidents in the last decade or so, and of course we have various flus and even Ebola. I think we accepted that disease was a risk, but I don’t think we ever thought of it as a natural disaster capable of collapsing economies. It probably didn’t happen this time, and probably won’t even in 2021, but it could have. That means it likely will at some point.
In a world whose supply chains, tourism, and business travel link every country, it doesn’t take much for something bad and local to become bad and global. Some will say that this means we should cultivate work from home and take other steps to limit the travel that spreads diseases, and while that could be a good idea for other reasons, it’s not going to stop a future pandemic. People will travel, goods will move, and even a little would be enough.
Technology could play a role in protecting us, not so much by replacing real travel with virtual travel, but by monitoring conditions. We’ll have to navigate legitimate issues of privacy, but all societies rely on a surrender-something-for-more-gain theory. I saw infrared camera monitoring in Africa during the Ebola crisis, and it’s still in place. We didn’t have it here, even when I returned from Africa during Ebola, and that’s probably not smart if we don’t want a future economic collapse.
Google and Apple, I think, have a germ of a good idea in mobile-device contact tracing. It will be important that it not turn into a way of stalking someone, but if we could be aware of interactions close enough to spread disease, and then check the affected people, we could have a head up on the next one.
If we can test quickly. Some countries did quite well with testing, isolation, social distancing. The US, not so well. The most important technical advances we could seek now are those that might apply things like AI to virology/epidemiology. A rapid test for a disease, and for immunity among those who might have had it without symptoms, could frame a strong and realistic response to a new virus (or a new outbreak of COVID-19) short of shutting down the global economy.
Testing and monitoring might have global political consequences. Many viruses get their start by crossovers between animals and humans, crossovers that often happen because of local cultural practices that have been in place for generations. When globalism combines with this localism, does it create a risk that has to be monitored across national and political boundaries? Do we need to not only watch our people for signs of disease, but watch others in case they’re developing something that could spread to us? How would we deal with a country who refused to allow monitoring and refused to abandon their local cultural practices?
What about remote work and work-from-home? I don’t think that fear of another pandemic is going to motivate companies to shift their policies radically for the long term, but it’s likely that we’ll see a very strong shift in attitude. Companies will want to have a productive WFH strategy in place, to be executed if needed. That strategy, if it’s good enough, may also have the effect of empowering home work for a larger percentage of the workforce, but it will be the strength and value of the strategy and not the fear of pandemic that will do this.
For the Internet, we’ve learned that while we use the term as though there was one universal service spreading globally, we really have local pockets of “internet” that combine to create “Internet”. Where those pockets have CATV or fiber access, the Internet rode out the situation quite well. I personally never noticed any issues at all, but I know people who had major problems even doing conference calls.
We have to decide whether we want to have a true base level of broadband access available for home use. If we decide we do, we’ll have to figure out how to fund the copper-loop replacements. If we don’t, we’ll have to accept that WFH isn’t going to work in some areas, and so companies there will be at risk if there’s a shutdown in the future.
We also have to examine another online phenomenon, which is the ad sponsorship issue. If what we can do online, even what we can view on TV, depends on how much ad revenue it can generate, we’re creating a filter on reality. Many people tell me that pandemic information on social media has been manipulative, wrong, horrible. Maybe; I didn’t look. I do believe that news coverage of the pandemic and the response has been bad, so bad that I’ve stopped watching some material completely. For me, it’s not political, it’s about truth and accuracy. If I think somebody is saying something to generate views/clicks, I’m out of there. How do we keep people informed if the information resources are watching their ad revenues and not the real world?
Then there’s the problem of potential advertising collapse. If all the world is ad-funded, what happens when retail sales take a big hit, as they have in the pandemic? With the decline in ad revenue, we are at risk of losing that which is sponsored by advertising. What happens to our online lives if the sponsors cut back? We need to think about that, before we lose that sponsorship. Is broadband a true public utility? We just moved in the other direction. Is search, news? That’s a big step.
Finally, there’s tech budgeting. There’s a lot of talk now that the wonderful thing about “moving everything to the cloud” is that your costs could expand and contract as your business does. If a pandemic creates an economic crash that dries up your revenues, you could lower your costs too. To a degree, a small degree, that’s true. But most companies would tell you that IT spending was a small piece of their operating budget. The virus isn’t going to move everything, or even a lot more, to the cloud…at least not directly.
The pandemic has shown that retail front-ends, either for sales or customer service, have to be a lot more flexible and agile. Thus, we can expect to see more cloud front-end development coming along, even this year. Enterprises who have given me data on this say that they expect to spend 18% more on cloud front-end development and deployment in 2020, versus budgets.
That could be the bright spot, budget-wise. The same companies say that they will slow-roll capital projects in IT, especially projects that don’t meet their “urgent” definitions. They want to see whether the virus will kick up again in the fall, and how fast their own customer base responds to the gradual re-opening of their economies. They’re not saying they’re cutting costs, only that they’re delaying previously approved spending. Most think that their IT spending this year will be off, an average of about 2.5%, versus up around that same amount, which is therefore a 5% drop versus expectations.
The impact of all of this on tech vendors will vary. I think that the largest of the players in the space will be favored. Businesses will be wary of the stability of their technology suppliers, fearing loss of support or even failures to deliver. Bigger firms with bigger names have an easier time promoting customer engagement at a time when sales calls are either risky or downright forbidden. IBM’s quarterly report was light on revenue versus expectations, but they beat on earnings. This could make them a preferred partner over smaller open-source players who are yet to report, and who may be impacted more.
Many of the other issues arising from the pandemic are beyond anything but guessing. Will it hurt or help 5G? Neither, probably, but who knows? Will consumer sales of tech be stronger than business? Probably, but probably not as strong as they would have been. Will public policies on broadband change? Probably not, but of course we can expect to see some more committees and studies.
We’re not out of the woods on this yet, friends, but it’s not too early to start thinking about the next one down the line. We can do better.