ASSIGNMENT ON ONLINE INFORMATION INDUSTRIES SUMMARY OF THE NEW INFORMATION INDUSTRY

NAME: OJI OGECHUKWU LUCY

REG NO: MIM/EDUC/6787/2009-2010

ASSIGNMENT ON ONLINE INFORMATION INDUSTRIES

SUMMARY OF THE NEW INFORMATION INDUSTRY

The information industries are in the stage of transformation. Before now, industries were organized on the basis of information form; companies tended to focus on business opportunities related to a single form of information such as voice, text, image, audio/video or data. But extra ordinary advances have occurred over the past two decades and are continuing at a break-neck pace in digital electronics.

Information based businesses are becoming increasingly crucial to commercial and social lives, as such inefficiencies in the information market place are becoming less tolerable. The vision therefore is that of a convergent information industry which will eventually create global economic communication network that links people and organizations to everyone else.

To accomplish this, there is beginning to exist an avalanche of mergers and alliances. This merger not only represents a belief by corporate titans in the virtues of scale and vertical integration. They also represent stakes on how the industry will evolve. What pushes convergence of different forms of information is technological change, primarily, the rapid flow of digital technology into an ever wider group of information technology businesses.

To add verve to the impending new information age, the advent of the micro processor introduced a paradigm shift that pushed the power of the computer to the desktop.

Further developments, in miniaturization and electric storage may have made laptop computers more powerful than mainframes, while computing power and affordability are expanding at a dramatic rate; they are doing so in a relatively steady fashion. On the other hand, advances in telecommunication promises a greater change of a sporadic nature which will in the near future see an explosion of bandwidth that will dwarf anything seen in the past.

It is important to mention the sociology of convergence as sociological implication will ultimately drive the IT industry. This is most clearly illustrated by the explosion of the internet. The sociological implications of an interactive broadband communications infrastructure are not yet fully understood but will undoubtedly be profound. This interactive broadband technology will cause the most dramatic shift in behavioral patterns, since the introduction of automobile. It will affect how people shop, socialize, are entertained, conduct business and handle finances, with information technology moving towards electronics and digitization.

It is being postulated that when the industry realigns based on functional capabilities, the dominant players world wide will very likely be from the entertainment, consumer electronics, personal computer and communication industries.

Todays computing industry will be eventually diffused with distributed memory and processing through miniaturization and electronic networks, these capabilities will get diffused to the point that traditional stand-alone computers will be unnecessary. However many new services will certainly emerge. The convergence of information will ensue because technological and business imperatives are compelling. What is not cast in stone is exactly who will lead the revolution. Interesting times are ahead of us.

COMMENTS

Some of the futuristic gigantic transformation discussed in this paper has already been deployed. The convergence in the information industries is apparent as technological and business imperatives have occasioned its birth. Back in 2009, Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC) announced the convergence era in the communication industry in Nigeria. This has seen the telecommunication operators use any compatible technology to deploy their services in the Nigerian market. The changes to be expected in the socio-economic world as a result of the paradigm shift in IT industry are highlighted in this paper.

However the paper needs to be updated to capture the present convergence technology being used in the information technology industries.

Finally, this paper does not have references to aid further reading and research on the topic in discuss.