'The new net boom' announces Fortune. In California, venture capital is flowing. After five years in the doldrums, tech is back. And it's back big time. Last time it was only dotcoms, telecoms and computers that boomed. Today virtually every industry on Earth is experiencing rapid change. Hollywood is digitising. Airlines are digitising. Fast food service is digitising. Soon, with the arrival of radio ID chips on every package in every supermarket, the humble food and drink industries will digitise too.

But as the world again gets excited by all things tech, perhaps we should pause and remember how things ended in 1999/2000. When a trillion dollars of technical development crashed into a mountain of user indifference, and tech entered a depression. Millions of people lost their jobs and their pensions. And it could happen again.

How could it happen? Digital technology gets twice as powerful every eighteen months. And it's predicted to keep doing so for the next two decades. No industrial change in history has happened as fast as today's digital revolution. As this happens, we tend to forget that there is one part of the digital world that hasn't gotten any more powerful. Not just in the past few years. But in the past ten thousand. The mind of its user.

Strain on the brain. Each year, consumers are presented with new, more complex digital products and services. But each year, their ability to understand them does not rise. Twenty years ago, a phone was a simple device, with one dial. Many of today's phones are packed with complex, badly understood functions.

Twenty years ago a television had one dial and a volume knob. Today's AV systems have tens of each. The technology is leaving its consumer behind. And it's getting worse.

Meanwhile, technology keeps moving on at high speed. Digital devices will be ten times faster and more capable within five years, and perhaps one hundred times within ten. There is already a gulf between what technology can do and what consumers - both young and old - can make it do. As technology surges ahead, this gulf can do nothing else but grow.

Not funny. We may laugh when consumers fail to understand the full capabilities of their phones, TVs and computers. But the consumer's failure to grasp technology is not trivial. It leads to the vaporisation of venture capital. It is the issue that is increasingly holding back the whole digital revolution. Global growth, and the fate of nations depend on rapid adoption of new technology. It is thus the decisive issue of the early 21st century.

Download The Book