The online world is a place of rapid evolution, as thousands of startups and millions of programmers come up with ideas, hurriedly build them and then throw them into the market to see how people respond.
This process tends to happen in waves, as everyone rushes to build social platforms (for example) and then as that dust settles, a whole new batch of innovators comes along to launch tools to help individuals and businesses manage all those wonderful social platforms. All of this while still managing to get some other work done each day.
As we’re in the midst of these waves, techies need some way to sum up everything that’s happening at once, so we end up with catch-all terms like “Web 2.0,” which was everywhere in 2007 but hasn’t been used un-ironically since at least 2010.
The wave we’re in right now has a lot of different parts to it, which has led to, you guessed it, naming-by-acronym. The “SMAC Stack” – Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud – is a cool way of thinking about the big drivers in how we use the Internet today.
Social – Facebook may or may not be losing users, but the number of people who can’t stop refreshing their feeds/timeline continues to climb. Humans are social creatures and we’ll never stop connecting.
Mobile – Three out of five cell phone users now have a smartphone. And while Millennials are most often using smartphones in ways that change their buying behaviors, 40 percent of older adults (55+) opt for smartphones too.
Analytics – “Big Data” is making its way into a host of industries, from retail to healthcare to, yes, hospitality and travel. Amazon and Netflix understand (some) aspects of their customers better than their own friends do.
Cloud – The era of “heavy” premise-based technology solutions is coming to an end. Why buy another hard drive to store all your music and movies when a) those can fail and b) you can grab them any time you want from Apple, Amazon or Google? The argument is even more compelling for businesses that can avoid high up-front investments and require maximum uptime.
These trends might seem extremely obvious to many readers, but where things start to get more interesting is with the second half of the name. It’s the “stacking” of these mutually reinforcing components that makes each of them more powerful.
Ten years ago, a traveler heading towards an unfamiliar highway exit could pull out her (dumb) mobile phone, dial information, and call ahead to see if any hotels had available rooms. Today, that same traveler can do her own search, confirm availability online, look at photos of the property, and read reviews from TripAdvisor or Yelp, hopefully while in the passenger seat.
This has massive impacts on how hotels run their businesses. It used to be the case that being the first hotel off an exit ramp was a major advantage. In the modern world, that might still be true, but only if 1,000 people online haven’t complained about the cracks in the swimming pool or the spotty service. Now we’re talking SMAC, and so should businesses that rely on customer response. In future posts, we’ll talk more about the ways the SMAC Stack is fundamentally re-shaping the hospitality industry.
