Weekend

For this weekend, the hatke topic  for my blog is as follows:

There is a an old proverb which says” that change is inevitable, and who does not change with the change is left behind”

During my life time I have seen so many changes that it will be difficult to count even on my fingertips, but today I am going to discuss about few companies/products who did not kept pace with the changes happening and were left behind in recent times.

1. Watches- There was a time when HMT watches were leading brand in the country with the market share of more than 70%, I have seen the time when HMT watches were in short supply and you have to wait for the particular brand. In the late 80s, when a Tata group launched Titan digital watches in a big way and took the Indian watch market by storm, HMT were left behind and after few years they were wiped out from the market. The reason being they did not  went with the times and launched the digital watch.
2. Scooters- There was a time till 80s that Indian scooter market was capitalised by Bajaj Scooters and other minor players were Govt owned API Scooters and Vijay scooters. Bajaj  had almost 10 years of waiting list. But when new scooters from multi national companies were launched in the country, suddenly the Bajaj company felt the jolt as their market share started shrinking. The prime reason was new scooters had better features and were more fuel efficient. As Bajaj was sitting in monopoly market they never bothered to improve their scooters.
3. Cars- Till mid 80s car market was ruled by Hindustan Motor’s Ambassador and Premiers Automobiles’ Padmini, and both had a waiting list of  years together. First they were hit by Maruti Suzuki’s small car launched in 1985/86, which revolutionised the car market, and in the 90s when other cars from multinational cos entered Indian market, these 2 companies totally lost the market. Here also the problem was same , these 2 companies never bothered to modernise their car and eventually both the companies closed their shutters.
4. Other Example is Kodak company- They used to manufacture  cameras and sold 85% 0f the the world’s photographic papers but the company was utter failure in forecasting the future of digital photography, and company which employed 170,000 people world wide went bankrupt.
5. Another example is Nokia Company , which used to manufacture mobile phone instruments. They also did not react very fast when android technology based smart mobile phones entered the marked, and one fine day they became irrelevant in the mobile market. Only few years back all other companies were competing to take share of Nokia in the  market.

There was no complain about the quality of products manufactured by these companies, yet they were out of the market, the reason being  they have not changed with the times.

In the next 10/20 years ,the world will again change completely and  70 to     90 % of the the products running today will be become obsolete.

Now just look how the business is being operated now a days:

Ola and Uber companies do not own a single car, but together they run world’s largest cab service companies.

Similarly Airbnb, Oyo, Trivago do not own a single hotel room, but they run hotel room booking companies.

Why these companies are running, because customers find it convinient and secondly your hand held mobile has become a mini computer for you, and people can access apps of these companies 24 hours.

In future you may not know, how many professional services will become redundant. In US requirement of  Legal Professional services are reducing because of a software named IBM Watson, that gives better legal advice..

Even for cancer detection, software developed by IBM gives 4 times better accuracy than human doctors.

Trials are being conducted for driverless car and by 2020 many such cars will be on the roads. It is expected that in next 2 decades 90% of the cars will disappear from the roads, those who will survive will be either using electric  or hybrid cars. Most of the people will be using the services companies like Ola and Uber for travelling by road..

So change is a continuous process, you must have noticed that few years back there used to be local and STD call booth at every corner, but with mobile calls becoming cheaper, most of these booth are there but they are now doing the business of selling of mobile phone, accessories, recharge,  repair and maintenance.

So what is the moral, in this case, every person should continue to adopt changes in his life style and business, to survive.

What you say my friends.

Waiting for your comments/feed backs/views on this topic.