Steve Jordan looks at the international moving industry of the future - and doesn’t much like what he sees.
There were a lot of good things that came out of lockdown. I finished the summerhouse that I had been threatening to build for years; I learned how to use video communications properly, just like they did on Star Trek; and I walked the dog a lot.
Now walking the dog is intrinsically a good thing. It made me fitter, it made the dog fitter (though he is a bit of a Ferrari anyway), I learned how to recognise birdsong and identify more hedgerow plants, and I had more time to think. It was this last bit that caused the trouble. It started a train of thought that I didn’t like. You won’t like it either. In fact, I hope you disagree with me. But I’ll share it anyway and give you the opportunity to shoot me down in flames by writing outraged letters to the editor. To save you looking it up, e-mail me here.
What do we know?
Let me start with the bits we probably can agree on. We are living at a time when technology is playing an increasingly important role in our lives. Thank goodness it is, as we would all have been screwed these last two years if we’d not had all this clever stuff that has allowed us to keep working.
We can probably also agree that the rate of acceleration of technology has never been greater. I don’t know this to be true, but I feel it is. I have read articles by people who are supposed to know about things, and they say Moore’s Law (the power of computers doubles every 2 years) is still proving to be correct, 55+ years on. That’s exponential growth, something we have all become experts on recently. It’s likely to continue. In 20 years’ time the computers we will be using will be 1,000,000 times more powerful that those we have today. Ouch!
We also know that the world of corporate relocations is changing. There are more people moving, for a greater number of reasons, but the shipments are smaller and the current generation seems less attached to things. People are less precious about belongings and more interested in experiences. The two are, to some extent, mutually exclusive: it’s tough to live a nomadic lifestyle with a sofa on your back ...
Photo: Steve Jordan, Editor of The Mover.