In early 90s, although Bill Gates spoke of his vision of automated homes at a time, when Internet was coming out of the labs and computers were beginning to show up in offices, it did not translate to reality in Microsoft. He got diverted by windows and products, which were immediate evolution of the society.

Around the same time, SAP did remarkable job and timing was right to create infrastructure for companies to operate globally but nucleus of innovation by SAP was to organize internal processes around manufacturing and optimize workflow across various departments and geographies. It created an ecosystem but forgot to see Internet is booming and consumer would become integral part of the ecosystem. SAP did create an ecosystem of the organization except integrating customers in it.

During all these while, Internet was silently growing and outside these organizations, it was being picked by likes of Yahoo, hotmail and Amazon.com to demonstrate what Internet could be used as a media to connect with consumers. It acted as media and media as known to organizations traditionally has been an activity of outsourcing for promotion, branding & marketing. Investment in technology stopped for organizations the moment chief marketing took over the product and services for launch and the best use of Internet was found by companies to create an online brochure, which most organizations did. They did not see this as an emerging media that is based on technology and connecting consumers to their boardroom.

While in late 90s, when companies were still struggling to understand adaptation of Internet for their integrated approach, consumers were quick and adopted technology. Suddenly they were communicating globally which accelerated globalization at incredible pace.

That gave birth to Google. An organization, which connected consumers with brands and began to make information a commodity. It did few innovations, which brought paradigm shift to various classical mindsets and business models.
a) It was demonstration of technology acting as media
b) Direct to consumer and forcing organizations to adopt- clear departure of classical way of developing technology first for corporate customers for internal use.
c) Pull based model for information- a clear departure from push based model of traditional advertising companies broadcasting advertisements to consumers using Print, TV & Radio.
d) Non intrusive business model of advertising against normal interruption based business model of traditional media companies

Being Stanford graduate and being deeply rooted as technologists, Google founders Sergey and Larry, began to make same mistake as Bill gates and SAP did. Obsession to technology made them blind about other emerging, more powerful phenomenon coming out of their innovation as consumer saw. Consumer behavior was changing because of Google; in fact, it was changing so fast that organizations were caught unaware and before they could get their act together, they were attacked by yet another evolution- mobile. A device, which began to give much-needed teeth to democracy.

Sergey and Larry fell in love with Microsoft and thought that they could bring another innovation to the market place by forcing consumers to change their behavior from desktop based to ASP based model for computing applications and began to compare themselves with Microsoft. Imagine further innovation of next generation company like Google trying to beat classical business model of last generation innovator Microsoft to force consumers to change their behavior from desktop based model to ASP based application.

With Internet, throughout 90s, consumer behavior went through massive evolution. Global information on a click, global communication, and rising economic power made consumers better decision makers and when Google gave them information on demand, they clearly were glued to it and started to discard traditional media for information. Traditional media thrived in last one century based on the fact that information, entertainment is premium and that brought advertisers to connect with consumers to promote their products.

While in beginning of 21st century, Google was chasing Microsoft on the western shores of USA; Sir Martin Sorrel of WPP walking on the street of London was quick to recognize what Google did to his business. He was quick to call Google its biggest threat and future competition. In fact, he saw early sign of death of advertising as consumers adapted to “on demand” behavior for information.

Can WPP drive innovation for next generation and evolve from advertising to become marketing company and yet find a business model where he can start where Google leaves a consumer high and dry.
As per metaphysics of innovation and pattern of evolution, it is quite unlikely that WPP can actually become next generation innovation.

What SAP forgot to do, CRM failed in doing it and Google missed out, having shown the path and WPP recognized was to build an ecosystem of all stakeholders around an issue and sustain a value proposition for all to create complete consumer engagement lifecycle management using digital media.

After connecting a consumer with brand, which traditionally WPP did using print, TV and Radio, Google left them high and dry and rest all activities between consumer and brands were carried out as offline engagement. Right from suspect stage to loyalty to a specific brand was done almost off line and this is where gap exist in the market place to create an ecosystem of all stakeholders around an issue and keep a consumer engaged throughout the lifecycle of his decision making, purchase & customer service. This is where ERPs, CRM and SCMs of last generations need to be rewritten to have community of consumers in the center of their architecture.
How can organizations create an online ecosystem, which essentially becomes media to engage a consumer? Is it as simple as creating web 2.0 based social networking, blogging based website or does it call for creating an end-to-end process to meet consumer needs throughout as they did internally with ERP??

At Mobile Mantra, we did work on innovation for last 7 years, spanning 3 continents, triggered by one acquisition of Mobile Application Company in Switzerland and few global angel investors and went empty stomach to transform a small It services company into a end to end consumer engagement lifecycle management application suits. All these years, we worked on creating innovation and finally succeeded in creating robust products to create ecosystem of all stakeholders around an issue. We begin where Google leaves consumers and we remain with you either till you file a consumer court case or become loyal customer or MIS gives CEOs good insight on why you left them. We demonstrated last year success of new age media in building ecosystem and turned out to be the finest example of e-governance. We took over www.core.nic.in - an initiative of ministry of consumer affairs, GOI, to turn an NGO into revenue making organization in 9 months. www.core.nic.in is an ecosystem of consumers, brands and government around consumer grievances and it helps companies build their brand around retention and avoid litigations.

Hence, time is ripe when technology needs to make life easy for people and solve their problems and business model for next generation companies need to be social entrepreneurs and this is where consumers, technology, governance, corporate would come together with holistic business model and yes, advertising would evolve into presenting information as matter of fact.