Generation Y - mobile and connected
Posted by DavidM in Interesting stuff | 10 December 2007
I'm part of the generation that lived through the transition from off-line to online. When I started work after university I had a bulky old desktop running in DOS and you saved your data on floppy disk. There was no such thing as email and my computer wasn't linked to others in the same office, let alone able to communicate worldwide.
But Generation Y, people born between 1978 and 1998, grew up in an online world.
I read Iain Murray's column in Marketing Week and he had comments from Emma Reynolds of Ask Gen Y research that brought home how different the world is for the next generation.
"We've never had to memorise a phone number and we've never had to get off the sofa to change a channel on the TV. You won't find many Gen Y-ers in the local library and it's highly unlikely we would ever use a real dictionary to check a spelling." She calls Gen Y "the world's first truly mobile and connected generation".
This will have huge implications for retailers, business and other institutions as this generation comes through as consumers, employees and business-people.
The other day I heard about one large corporation that no longer gives new graduate employees a standard comms and IT pack. It has recognised they are tech-savvy so allocates them a budget and they select the equipment they think they need.
I can also see it with my children. They are both under 10 and use the computer regularly. One to look up cheats for Playstation games, the other to interact with friends in online communities. Both immediately think of Google if they don't know something, shunning the encyclopedia that I used to turn to.
Every generation brings change, but the scale of that change with Gen Y will be greater because of the fundamental shift created by technology and the internet.
It's going to be a fascinating time and I just hope I can keep up!