Digital Insights 2020

De Kare-Silver Michael

Description

From the author of the ground-breaking and landmark books e-shock 2000, Strategy in Crisis and Streamlining, comes this breakthrough new work looking at the future of the digital age. Digital Insights 2020 examines how the rapidly developing technology revolution is changing the way businesses must operate in this unfolding 21st century. It also considers the impact on people and how our daily lives and lifestyles will change... forever. Included is a blueprint and roadmap showing how companies can navigate their way through the rapidly changing environment and still emerge as winners. Our computer world of point-and-click is morphing into 'Think', 'Talk' and 'Move', where just thought, voice and simple remote gestures will control 3D holographic displays of data, content and video. Companies will need to reinvent themselves as MCEs (multi-channel enterprises), in which there is seamless cross-channel interaction with customers and they will also need to change the way their operating systems and processes are organised. Most every business in most every sector will need to manage its way through significant 'digital transformation'. New advances in the Cloud will cut costs and time to market and challenge decades of IT infrastructure. Technology generally is now becoming the key source of enablement and competitive advantage. Written by someone on the 'front line of digital', this book is essential for anyone looking to take advantage of the digital world to increase revenues and profits.

Sujets

• Marketing et communication
• Strategic management

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784626730
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALSO BY STEVE MILLWARD:
From Blues To Rock: An Analytical History Of Pop Music - with David Hatch (Manchester University Press)
Changing Times: Music And Politics In 1964 (Matador)

Copyright 2014 Steve Millward
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1784626 730
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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
For my friends
Preface
In June 1970 I was one of the first generation of eighteen-year-olds able to vote in a UK General Election and duly went off to the polling station in my school uniform. The following month I left school and moved with my family from Worcester to Leicester. I spent the summer listening to records, going to see bands like Derek and The Dominos at the De Montfort Hall and watching the World Cycling Championships. In September 1970 I went to university. At school my favourite bands had been The Beatles, The Who and Cream, but now I was introduced to a variety of new music - Fairport Convention, Love, The Soft Machine, Crosby, Stills and Nash, James Taylor and many others. Like most students of the era, I participated in marches, demos and sit-ins. Yet at the same time there was an uneasy feeling that things were not quite as good as they had been in the glory days of the 1960s.
I mention these autobiographical details to illustrate how much I understood about 1970 at the time, and also how little. While I can claim that many of the arguments contained in this book stem from direct experience, I would be the first to admit that it is only in retrospect that the real significance of the year began to dawn on me. Those who have read my last book will know that in my view the year 1964 marked the beginning of so much that was important in the swinging sixties . In 1970 most of it came to an end. Yet that enabled new ideas to flourish, unencumbered by the precepts of the previous generation. Not all of these developments were beneficial, constructive or desirable but in nearly every case they determined the political and musical undercurrents of what was to be a very different decade.
Deciding just what comprises the music of 1970 is no easy task. LPs (long-playing records, for those too young to recognise the term) had taken over from singles as the preferred format of the leading artists in rock, the most creative, and popular, musical idiom of the period. But the huge amount of time often involved in producing them meant the interval between commencement and eventual release might span two calendar years. For the purposes of this book I include any item both recorded and issued within the year, plus any item made in 1969 (or earlier) and released in 1970 - on the obvious basis that its impact could only date from when it became available. For the same reason I have tended to omit records made in 1970 but not released until later unless specific events from 1970 influenced their creation.
Many people have helped me write Different Tracks. Some loaned records, films, books or periodicals; others gave interviews or offered advice, comment and feedback. So my grateful thanks go to Nicky Crewe, Julie Downing, Dave Driver, Tim Gausden, Simon Harmsworth, Beverly Howbrook, Louise Hunt, Chris Lee, Matt Luheshi, Jackie Marsh, Mary Millward, Matthew Millward, Tom Millward, Linda Moore, Rich Page, Julia Polyblank, Jim Rafferty, Jennie Singer, Jenny Slaughter and Sid Toole. Special mention must be made of John Greenway and Pete Newton who gave me access to their extensive collections of material from the period; Pete also contributed valuable facts and suggestions concerning the ECM label. Finally I should like to express my gratitude to Naomi Green and the team at Troubador for their patience, guidance and support.
Contents
Preface
1 All Things Must Pass
2 Ball Of Confusion
3 Save The Country
4 I Me Mine
5 Gotta Find A New World
6 Bitches Brew
7 Powerman And The Moneygoround
8 Future Blues
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Music Index
CHAPTER 1:
All Things Must Pass
On 31 December 1969 Jimi Hendrix took his group, Band of Gypsys, into the Fillmore East, New York City. The two sets they played that night and the two a day later thus straddled the turn of the decade. As well as their temporal significance, Hendrix s shows also had a musical importance. His first three albums had balanced aggression with gentleness, yet here was a uniformly violent music, protesting not only the Vietnam War but racial injustice. In his spoken introduction to Machine Gun , an epic performance in which the band simulate the rapid fire of the eponymous weapon, he dedicates the piece to all the soldiers that are fighting in Chicago, Milwaukee and New York oh yeah, and all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam , thus equating the conflict in South East Asia with the civil rights demonstrations taking place in cities across America. His two colleagues in the band, Billy Cox and Buddy Miles, were both African-Americans, having replaced the white musicians Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, his partners in The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
But Hendrix s appearance at the Fillmore East also symbolised a cultural shift, away from the carefree hedonism of the 1960s and towards the brutish uncertainties of the 1970s. The wind was now blowing in a different direction and the atmosphere was changing. Insurrection, revolution and terrorism were rife while the suppression of legitimate protest was allowing an illegitimate variant to flourish. And the war in Vietnam still dragged on, spilling over into neighbouring Cambodia.
Just as the creative energy of the mid-1960s had been ignited by the explosive music of The Beatles, so it was that a concert on 6 December 1969 by their friends and rivals, The Rolling Stones, seemed to extinguish it. At the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, organised and headlined by the band, there were four deaths. Three of them were accidental but one, shockingly, was not: Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by one of the Hell s Angels allegedly policing the event. Later it transpired that Hunter was carrying a gun and high on amphetamines, and his assailant, Alan Passaro, was acquitted of murder. Nevertheless, Altamont was a sharp contrast to the peaceful Woodstock Festival, held only three months earlier and attended by a much larger audience.
Jimi Hendrix was doing no more than confirming what Altamont had signalled: the end of a dream and the start of a new reality. Within nine months he himself was dead, his demise symbolic of the passing of an era: for 1970 saw the decline and death of many things - not only in music but also in the world of politics, and in society more widely. What came next rose from the ashes and heralded, or indeed constituted, a revolution.
* * * * *
For most of 1969 there was little hint that change was on the way: in fact it might be argued that the last year of the 1960s was in many respects its most stable, at least in the Western world. President Richard Nixon, for example, seemed to be convincing the American people that he was dealing competently with the Vietnam War. The first troop withdrawals began in early July and later in the month he was able to bask in the reflected glory of the Apollo 11 moon landing. During the year Nixon s approval rating did not fall below 56%, while his disapproval rating never exceeded 29%. Contrast that with 1970, when he fell below 56% approval nine times and exceeded 29% disapproval on no fewer than eleven occasions. *
In the UK, the early part of the year had proved difficult for Prime Minister Harold Wilson, but he restored order (at least temporarily) after the August riots in Northern Ireland by deploying soldiers to protect the Catholic minority. By the autumn, the economy had improved, with excellent trade figures caused by a boom in exports. Elsewhere in Europe, there were new governments for both France and Germany. The latter was a coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the Free Democrats and was led by Willy Brandt, a courageous and popular politician who was keen to see a rapprochement with the Eastern Bloc. Untainted by any association with Nazism (just the opposite: he had been vehemently opposed to Hitler), Brandt seemed to be leading his country in a productive direction.
1969 was an uncharacteristically settled year across the major countries of South America. Military governments were operating in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru; Ecuador, Chile and Venezuela were under Conservative/Christian Democrat control; while Colombia was ruled by the National Front coalition of Conservatives and Liberals. Only in Bolivia and Uruguay was there any instability. Furthermore few of these regimes were showing any frailty, except perhaps in Chile, where President Frei was struggling to make good his promises of far-reaching reforms.
It was almost as if the West was having a breather after the turmoil of 1968, which had seen the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, violent student protests at the Sorbonne University in Paris, and riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago - let alone the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia where t