A Business Icon Quietly Fades Away

This morning I tossed away what used to be the most popular way for people to find products and services and contact companies they wanted to do business with. Several big three-inch thick copies of the 2008-2009 Chicago Yellow Pages have been sitting on my front porch where the delivery person dropped them off several weeks ago. I haven’t even bothered to bring them inside, and this morning I finally admitted I would never use them. A feeling of sweet sorrow and nostalgia swept over me.

An iconic artifact, the big thick paper phone book, is rapidly receding into the fuzzy mists of time. I use Internet search engines or specialty websites to find everything from cat sitting services to building contractors, furniture, consumer electronics, restaurants and movies. I’m in an age group that still thinks of the 1980’s as relatively recent history, but even for me, it’s probably been five or six years since I last used a paper phone book of any kind.

The name Yellow Pages lives on and is still valuable; witness the number of plays on “yellow” and “yellowpages” in website addresses. But soon even the name will fade because domain names can be as random and cryptic as phone numbers; people use search engines anyway, so who cares what the domain name is?

Things we’ve discussed and debated for the last 10 years are happening with surprising speed simply because they have to. I realize this year is a tipping point. It feels like we hang in a moment of suspended animation between “life as we know it” and whatever is coming next. And much of what comes next does not require a Ph.D. to predict.

Obviously, the cost and environmental impact of traditional business practices like making paper, transporting paper, printing on paper, distributing printed material and disposing of all that stuff is no longer sustainable except for in certain niche applications. Information of all types is now mostly digitized and distributed electronically. And, obviously, cars will become smaller and more fuel efficient, houses will become smaller and more energy efficient, twisted fluorescent light bulbs will replace incandescent bulbs; and sprawling suburbs will coalesce around new high density urban hubs using rail mass transit to reduce commute times, fuel use, wasteful land use and carbon emissions.

In the last 10 years information technology has broken out of the data center and become a primary ingredient in every new product and service. We are entirely replacing some traditional products like paper and printed forms with pure information; and we are integrating information technology into the core of most other products – automobiles, houses, telephones, financial services, health care, etc. - to make them less expensive and more responsive to those driving necessities that shape the 21st Century.

I don’t expect Gen Y to shed a tear over the passing of icons like the Yellow Pages because those things were already fading as they came of age. But for the rest of us, from Greatest Generation to Boomers to Gen X, we are going to experience quite a few moments of sweet sorrow and nostalgia in the next several years. I can think of a number of other fast fading icons and how IT is used to create new products that replace them; what comes to mind for you?