Last week I had a meeting with an ex-Microsoftie. He was telling me about the unintended consequence of Microsoft creating Encarta. It literally destroyed the encyclopedia business overnight. Suddenly Encyclopedia Brittanica was virtually worthless...

Think about it. The impact technology has is that while on the one hand it may help increase productivity, accelerate knowledge transfer, discovery etc, the disruptive impact is often extraordinary.

And while the impact of Encarta on Brittanica was very visible, more often than not, disruption takes more time before its impact is felt.

Over the last few years we have seen enormous changes in the music industry. The industry may blame it on P2P, but you can't blame a file sharing technology in isolation. The genesis of the change took place with the move from analog to digital.

It is the impact of digital technology that is in the process of massively reshaping the world and everything that we experience. Every business model has to change. Every assumption has to be questioned. And wait for it. Historry will repeat. We will have neo-Luddites that will want to destroy all computers.

It wont happen for a few years. But as the sheer mass of computing power redoubles time and again over the next two, or three years, the changes that we have been experiencing over the last ten years will seem minor by comparison.

Imagine compressing all the changes from the beginning of the Internet some 10 or so years ago into 1 year. Because that is the speed at which new technologies are hitting the market.

The only way to survive is to find a way to embrace the change, to ingest it, to be part of it. Eat it and drink it. Because what we thought of as an iterative process is about to get so fast that we will  start to experience what appear to be tectonic shifts - Changequakes.

These changequakes will happen very strongly in the area of marketing, which is one of the areas that I find particularly fascinating. I believe that podcasts are going to play an integral part in establishing market mavens that will seed trends, unconsciously in the community. Fist it will be technology companies that create informative podcasts, then it will be consumer product based. And the power may be quite extraordinary. Particularly if major brands allow themselves the opportunity to actually find out what their consumers really want, and then tell them that they are responding.

Just remember that we always overestimate the impact of new technology in the short term, and underestimate the impact of the same technology in the long term. Podcasting is not the new Golden Age of Radio... Podcasting is a whole new game. It is the placement of the message deep inside the psyche of the consumer as a result of delivering the content via headphones into the participant's head.