The Digital Revolution
We have been given a wonderful opportunity to look back through the years at the digital revolution through the eyes of many of our ActiveRain Partners as to the very beginnings of the tech explosion.
Living History First Hand
I thoroughly enjoyed reading so many blogs about this because I also experienced it. I started working as a teenager in the late 1960s and by 1972, I was looking for my first residence. My future husband and I decided on buying a townhome. How did we find it? We went driving in the area we wanted to live.
New Developments Were Everywhere
In California, there were new developments popping up everywhere. You would open the Sunday LA Times paper and see the ads for new home developments and drive and see it. We upgraded homes 4 times in the Inland Empire before buying our current home in Sedona Arizona. The process was always the same. Look in the paper for developments or drive the area.
Buying and Selling - and Resale
I sold 3 of our 4 homes. How did I do this? My brother-in-law got his degree in commercial real estate and ended up owning his own Commercial Real Estate Brokerage with a partner. So he guided me in the process. He was my Internet!
When I started selling my own homes, the paperwork was just a few pages. In fact, If memory serves me, I got the contracts at a stationery store. It was shorter than a car sales contract of today. Of the 6 homes we have owned, only a couple of buyer agents were utilized and the first and last California home we sold with an agent.
Fast Forward to 2006
PC vs Mac Computers - Why Switch?
Up until 2006, our business career meant using a PC. Macs were not an option. So in 2006 when Macs started using Intel processors, my husband who is the tech person of the relationship, decided we should switch to Macs. He bought a desktop for himself to see how easy the transition was.
The process with the PC was the constant maintenance and upgrade and issues with security. Macs were less susceptible to hacking back then. My husband spent more time fixing issues than using the computer. He found the process easy to change. Once he knew what he was doing, he trained me. The change over was much easier than we thought. Rick only had 4 months left until he retired so there was no conflict with using a work computer.
Fast Forward to 2011
This brings us to the start of my career in Real Estate. The big issue I had was using a Mac in a PC real estate world. The Internet was starting to take off but in my Sedona real estate world, all the programs for real estate required Microsoft Explorer. At the time Microsoft was proprietary and wasn't available on a Mac operating system. So I had to have two operating systems on my computer. This was cumbersome, to say the least! There had to be a better way.
Enter...The 3rd Wave of the Digital Revolution
What is the Cloud?
From the research I did and picking my husband's brain, the symbol on the flow chart that represented the Internet was a cloud. Looking at the Feature Image above, you will notice the symbol for the "iCloud Drive" is a cloud. Look at the image below and you will see that cloud as well in many spots.
Why is the Cloud So Important?
Without making this a book instead of a blog...
The 3 Waves of Digital Transformation are:
- Business Processes
- Business Offerings
- Customer Needs - Bingo! This is where we are now.
You may have heard of an API. If not, it is an Application Programming Interface. ( I didn't know this either! haha)
Any time you open your smartphone, iPad, or desktop and check your weather, Facebook, email, etc., you are using an API. There are thousands and thousands of these. They are considered products or (Apps) now more so than just code.
Because of the Cloud, we can use the operating system of our choice. We can store all our files in the cloud. We can access just about anything we want from any computer using cloud-based APIs or Apps.
Why Do I Care About This?
My husband created my first website which was also a responsive website, in 2011 (see below). He used an API to do this on his Mac desktop. We have to send images through an API to a company that does our print ads. Just about everything I do or you do, requires the Cloud in today's world. I even have a real-time backup for my files on my USB that go directly to the cloud from my computer.
As a side note:
Also in 2012 - Rick had an app created by Cevado for smartphone use. There was only one issue. Very few people were using smartphones for their real estate needs back then. It was about 1% of the hits for my website, so we got rid of it.
Below is a chart in 2018 of how many people use a mobile device (probably an iPad) to find real estate.
I am not sure where I would be without Rick's help. He is a shout away in the other room and helps me with everything technical. This would be extremely hard to do without the "Cloud".
This is an entry for the challenge "Things We Have Lost To The Internet".
Thank you to Gary Frimann and Kathleen Daniels, Probate & Trust Specialist for hosting this challenge.
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