The inevitable has happened
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From a consumer-tech PoV: TikTok and Instagram have also seen the biggest gains. I see reviews of products and books, highlights of past sporting events, short movies and stories, short-form memes and videos explode in quantity. Instagram is now a Reddit and YouTube replacement rolled into one. Instagram still doesn't quite have a good story around content-discovery, yet, but it'll be interesting to see how their search and discovery changes in response. They've got the UX chops in spades to pull such a thing off. WhatsApp has rapidly replaced email, MMS, and SMS, but quite surprisingly is also now a social network, a news aggregator, a blogging network all mashed up into one. Everyone can get their opinions across or share opinions they think are novel.
Tellingly, WhatsApp's competitor, Telegram is increasingly becoming a PirateBay alternative. Netflix is in all households that can afford it, and people previously averse to technology are using Chromecast / FireTV and buying bigger TV sets to make good on their Netflix usage.
I'm not sure about the US, but where I live, people are learning to cook instead, partly out of fear of possible contamination spread through restaurant deliveries.
Shopify (and its clones) are gaining popularity among small business owners, as they desperately try to adopt technology in anticipation of an online-first, post-covid world.
For other industries, WFH (or really, work-from-wherever-you-are) would continue to gather steam and so, co-working spaces might see a jump, too. More likely that highly distributed offices become a norm, with people working from spaces closer to where they live. This might relieve a bit of pressure on higher real-estate prices in urban centers. It'd be interesting, then, to see how new-age tech-focused realty companies like zerodown, haus keep up with changing times.
Nice joke, for me Instagram is a barren, walled wasteland when it comes to valuable content, indexing and search seems to be non-existent from user perspective and human is reduced to mindless consumer of mental equivalent of fast-food served by algorithm - sparkling, shiny, low attention span, but without much of substance.
For me it's disheartening and hard to comprehend how it can be presented as replacement for services where you can learn almost anything,quite literally build and furnish your house from the ground up, etc.
Food / grocery delivery is still to expensive to be the "norm", especially for the middle class.
"It is not as if they had a choice. COVID-19 has exposed one harsh truth: digital channels are more flexible and faster to adapt to change than physical channels."
Yes. That being said, physical stores (after a CMBS crash) may get massively underpriced coming out of this recession.
Food delivery like expensive because it is combined with complicated meals, which are expensive in their own right (again, if you are time rich).
The biggest thing for me is just how arbitrary the pricing is. If I make an order I know is $8 at the drive through, and it costs $16 on DoorDash, and then there's a $7 fee, and then I have to tip $5, and then it still takes an hour and a half to get to me. Nah. Never that.
I'm learning how to cook now; I make a mean smash burger.
Destroying tech industry reputations and eroding trust is not a good long term play.
It's no better than infomercials touting free products with "just pay shipping and handling". Same sleaze, different generation.
In Australia, the two primary grocery outlets, Coles and Woolworths, already had online ordering and delivery. The use exploded with the lockdown but they have ramped up.
The cost for a delivery depends on the value of the order for Woolies and on time of day and delivery window for Coles but is of the order of $10-$15.
A lot of people have moved to the services to avoid going to the supermarkets, and many won't return to physical shopping for the weekly groceries.
The food delivery services are a bit different, there's the widely spread existing services like Dominos etc, but then there's the Uber Eats/Doordash etc. For the moment, the Eats/doordash people are screwing the restaurants, but they're starting to also charge more to the customers.
Its no surprise to me a brick and mortar CEO hasn't been quoted in the article. I have stopped counting how many digital transformation projects have gone no where in large non tech orgs.
Non-tech sector CEOs have zero choices. On the one hand they know well the speed at which their orgs can adapt/change, while on the other they know they have to pretend to everyone they can change at the speed at which tech does, or they just get labeled outdated and loose their job.