In 2024, what will we say we should have seen coming ten years before? Opening keynote to Fusion Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin by Peter Coffee of salesforce.com inc.

1. Fusion 2024
Looking Back at the Next Ten Years
Peter Coffee
VP for Strategic Research
salesforce.com inc.

2. BMW’s Winter Olympics Ad
Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and
hazardous occupation, because the prophet invariably
falls between two stools.
• If his prediction sounds at all reasonable, you can be quite
sure that in 20 or at most 50 years the progress of science and
technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative.
• If a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to
take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so
farfetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn.
If what I say now seems to be very reasonable, then I’ll fail
completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable,
have you any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.
- Sir Arthur C. Clarke, 1964

3. I Propose To Be Unreasonable – Believably
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Facts – what we can see is true right now
Observations – selected facts and calculations
Consequences – projections, scenarios, boundary cases
Actions – what we can do right now
Long View – what to watch; what would change our plan
By no accident at all, this turns out to have an acronym:
Permit me to introduce FOCAL

4. Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
 Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)

5. Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
 Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)
 Social Interaction: 757M people logged in to Facebook daily (4Feb’14)

6. Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
 Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)
 Social Interaction: 757M people logged in to Facebook daily (4Feb’14)
 Internet of Things: 2-3B devices were already connected

7. Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
 Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)
 Social Interaction: 757M people logged in to Facebook daily (4Feb’14)
 Internet of Things: 2-3B devices were already connected
 Data Science: Average salary topped $89k (11Apr’13)

8. Let’s Begin With Some Facts – in 2014…
 Mobility: 1/5 of world owned a smartphone, 1/17 a tablet (15Dec’13)
 Social Interaction: 757M people logged in to Facebook daily (4Feb’14)
 Internet of Things: 2-3B devices were already connected
 Data Science: Average salary topped $89k (11Apr’13)
 InfoSec: ½ of sensitive data were exposed (Dec’12)
 Higher Ed: ½-life of 4-year degree was ~18 mos. (1Mar’13)
 Labor Force: 20-30% of Fortune 100 were “contingent” (Mar’12)
 Healthcare: Cancer overtook heart disease in U.S. deaths (CDC & ACS)
 Competitiveness: 40% of MFG.com member
companies won new business in 1H12 that
had previously been offshored (27Jun’12)

9. Observations and Consequences
 People connected 24x7 → Social nets are lifestyle rather than activity;
everyone has “trusted advisor” networks and concierges always on call
 Smartphone always at hand → control panel available for any device, less
need to shoehorn a UI into everything; hands/eyes-free interaction
 Connected devices the norm, not the exception → too many apps, need a
universal container and a common convention for user interface
 Graying populations rely on connected/adaptive devices to “age in place”
 Data drive new disciplines with accelerating turnover of knowledge;
continuing education and increasing “freelancerization”
 Massive data feeds & fusions → unexpected combinations will disclose
activities & associations, with major trust implications

10. Actions
 Connected customers = reduced “retail arbitrage” opportunity: impels
unbundling of services, transparent value-based pricing
 Connection explosion creates demand for adaptive algorithms yielding
more autonomous behavior: think Nest thermostat, not Mission Control
 Apps explosion has to be contained: requires a universal container /
orchestrator and common conventions for user interface
 Everything needs an API that goes beyond exposing functions, able to
participate in conversations for value-adding interactions
 APIs and connections must stop relying on obscurity and novelty for
protection, adopting “trust but verify” safeguards & negotiation protocols

11. Long View
 The safest predictions are based on demographics
 The next-safest are based on geography
 Can disruption be forecast? Research unconvincing
 Are basic cultural norms up for grabs?
 Gender roles
 Work/life balance
 Family size & structure
 Definition of “standard of living”
“Geopolitics is about broad
impersonal forces that
constrain nations and human
beings and compel them to
act in certain ways.”
– George Friedman
 Is there an optimal strategy? Or is it all just game theory?
“When the monsoon is over, you don’t throw away your umbrella”
“If a crisis requires change of strategy, you didn’t have a strategy”

12. Coda: The Medium View?

“Forecasting is best left to the long run, the
span over which individual decisions don’t carry
so much weight. But having forecast for the long
run, you can reel back your scenario and try to
see how it plays out in, say, a decade.”

“What makes this time frame interesting is that it
is sufficiently long for the larger, impersonal
forces to be at play but short enough for the
individual decisions of individual leaders to skew
outcomes that otherwise might seem inevitable.
A decade is the point at which history and
statesmanship meet, and a span in which
policies still matter.”
– George Friedman

13. Peter Coffee
VP for Strategic Research
salesforce.com inc.
pcoffee@salesforce.com
@petercoffee
in/petercoffee
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

14. Bibliography
• www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-and-tablet-penetration-2013-10
• www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/04/facebook-in-numbers-statistics
• blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-connections-counter/
• www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-the-digital-universe-in-2020.pdf
• www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522085217.htm
• http://trendwatching.com/trends/upgradia/
• www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/education/edlife/universities-offer-courses-in-a-hot-new-field-data-science.html
• www.futuristspeaker.com/2013/03/the-half-life-of-a-college-education/
• blog.lib.umn.edu/cdescomm/cdes_memo/Thomas_Fisher_Public_Sector_Spring2012.pdf
• www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
• www.alz.org/downloads/facts_figures_2013.pdf
• unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2013_en.pdf
• www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2013_e/its2013_e.pdf
• www.forbes.com/sites/mitchfree/2012/06/27/is-the-re-shoring-of-manufacturing-a-trend-or-a-trickle/