How Much Obsolescence Can Business and Society Absorb?

This article on Harvard's 'Working Knowledge' website by Jim Heskett on adoption of new technologies is on exactly the subject I am pondering.  How do we engage employees, suppliers and customers with new technology? Should we bother? If they're not connected, shouldn't we just give them what they want, and not cater for the minority who understand the new stuff?

Here's the comment I posted on Heskett's article:

Much has been written in the past about the 'digital divide'. Those that are connected (or 'online' - to use its broadest context) and those who are not.  

All of us, commenting on this page, reading this article (which we found through a recommendation from another? through the Working Knowledge newsletter? an RSS feed?) and understanding the context are, by definition, 'connected'.

What is very easy to forget is the millions of people of all ages and generations who are not connected.  

I've presented and taught sessions on these new technologies to Gen Y managers who don't use Facebook and don't even know what a Twitter/Blog/Podcast/Wiki/RSS feed is. 

There is a big danger that as early adopters engage with more new technology, the late adopters and those who opt-out will fall further and further behind.  After all, it was easy before... you got an email address or you didn't.  You bought a mobile phone or you didn't. But with the huge variety of technologies and communication methods now available, there is no obvious area for new-comers to engage with... and it is easy to be overwhelmed by the options around. 

And what are organisations, if not groups of people, that include early-adopters and opt-outers?

The WWW took several years to achieve the critical mass that meant every organisation had to have a website and every worker  had to know how to use it on at least a rudimentary level.  It will take many more years before that critical mass is achieved with a lot of the Web 2.0 technologies (by which time many more new technologies will be around).  

Fundamentally, therefore, I think we need large scale adoption of various forms of aggregators - so that those who Tweet, and those who text, and those who blog, and those who post comments on other websites (etc.) will all be available in one, portable, user-friendly place.

iGoogle is getting there, but it's only when we get that integrated with the TV, mobile phone and eReaders that we will truly see the mass use of these tools.