All the world’s a game | The Economist.

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There are at least four major “generational scale” changes to the social landscape happening at about the same time:

•Technology platforms are shifting (mobility, cloud, social),

•Communication and collaboration channels are being reinvented (Web, mobile, social),

•The consumer’s need is driving innovation, and

•Data is opening up and exploding out of the proliferating apps, devices, and sensors.

There is an endless time flow of innovative new mobile and Web apps for managing travel, money, news, communication, productivity, and countless other key functions.  But this is not as important as what’s happening with communication.  There have been vast improvements in the ability to quickly connect, communicate, and collaborate with anyone in the world via social conversations, photos, audio, video, and more.

Finding and acquiring new software means just the click of a button in an app store.  User experiences are changing:  The aging graphical user interface is being uprooted by touch-based interfaces in new consumer apps that work much better in many physical situations.

The mantras of this new generation of Information Technology (IT) are “easy,” highly mobile, “knowledge worker,” and “social.”

With over 800 million users on Facebook, social media has already surpassed that original trailblazing vehicle of modern communication:  Email. Increasingly, the world is using social networks and other social media-based services to stay in touch, communicate, and collaborate.  The ubiquitous Internet and the new social media have created a generation of knowledgeable individuals or workers.

The convergence of social media, mobility, and the knowledgeable worker has resulted in these technologies providing new solutions to old problems.  The technology has also reduced the time to solve these everyday problems.

This revolution has sparked a whole new age of consumerism that has transformed the way individuals and businesses interact with the world today, leading to the creation of a new convergence of the individual, small business, and large business.

Understanding modern communications, and how technology can be easily used to help you move forward, is key to achieving your goal.

1. Empathy

The first three tenets of what would become Jobs’s philosophy actually came from Mike Markkula, angel investor and second CEO of Apple. In 1977, Markkula wrote a one-page paper titled The Apple Marketing Philosophy that stressed the notion that Apple should empathize with the needs of the consumer. “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company,” Markkula wrote. Jobs embodied this philosophy throughout his career; he saw himself as the consumer’s advocate within the company and demanded that all Apple devices made under his watch be as user-friendly as possible.

2. Focus

“In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities,” Markkula also wrote. The best example of how Jobs lived this tenet out was in 1997, when, after having returned to Apple as interim CEO, he cut 70 percent of the products that Apple was working on. In one meeting that September, Jobs drew a matrix with four quadrants. One was “Pro” and one was “Consumer,” and underneath those were “Desktop” and “Laptop.” Jobs also got Apple out of the printer business and killed off the Newton, its personal digital assistant. “This ability to focus saved Apple,” Isaacson wrote, noting that in his first year back, Jobs laid off more than 3,000 people, which “salvaged the company’s balance sheet.”

3. Impute

Markkula’s final diktat was basically that people do judge a book by its cover, so it’s important that Apple put its best foot forward in all communications with the customer. Markkula dubbed this concept “impute” and explained it thusly: “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc. If we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”Again, you don’t have to look far to see how Jobs carried this through. From the packaging of Apple products to the type of stone used in Apple stores (it’s gray-blue Pietera Serena sandstone from Il Casone, a family-owned quarry in Firenzoula, Italy, just outside of Florence—in case you were wondering), there was always an eye on presentation.

(Disclaimer: I have not written this post. It has been copied from an OpenForum.com article by Todd Waserman. You can read the article at http://www.openforum.com/articles/5-things-entrepreneurs-can-learn-from-steve-jobs)