Ubiquitous - the property of existing or being everywhere, or in all places, at the same time; omnipresent. Tools to communicate are always around us. In the past we had the telephone - expensive, and anchored to a point (the desk at work, the hallway in your house). Then the telephone moved into our pocket and came with us when we went out. And then the network moved from the closed telco standard to the open IP standard and suddenly all sorts of new things could be done.
What was once hard and expensive to do can now be done cheaply and quickly. When I want to buy a new plasma TV I find the one I want, perhaps in a shop, and then Google it (also, perhaps, in the shop) and find the same thing for less money. Why pay the shop's prices? In the past such research would have been time-consuming and expensive (all those phone calls!), and so we consumers were happy to do the trade-off and pay the shop's premium. No longer. The information asymetries and inefficiencies that once allowed firms huge pricing power are being eroded by the power of ubiquitous communications.
The internet is a communication mechanism, not a channel. It's two-way radio, not broadcast TV. People who do not know each other can exchange views about firms and products in ways which firms cannot hope to control. The power of the central marketing message, that of the brand, can be undone in a flash by anonymous people telling each other what they think.
The internet makes digital distribution practically cost-free. If it can be digitised, marginal cost of production drops to zero. Price will also drop to zero because price tends to marginal cost, absent monopoly power. It follows that businesses which made money exploiting scarcity must re-position when that scarcity no longer exists. The record-label business made tons of money controlling the distribution of scarce goods - media - but since it's a snap to digitise music that scarcity has vanished. The cost to the consumer of obtaining music is now zero; and yet companies are still trying to charge. Film too, and images; news - the newspaper-led, broadcast, top-down distribution of news as a model is fundamentally undermined when people who don't know each other can exchange news and views instantly and for nothing.
So how would I advise a CEO? Don't bother with a CIO/CTO - that's a baby-boomer thing and baby-boomers just do not understand. Really. Just as boomers don't know what a typewriter metaphor is, generation Y-ers don't know what a typewriter was. What business are you in, really? Ask schoolchildren what they think your business is. Does it rely on scarcity? Perhaps start treating previously scarce goods as promotional material for genuinely scarce goods. What's scarce? Time, and attention. Trust.
It's a new world, indeed.
