Celebrating 20 years of Colt

Colt turned 20 years old on Sunday 29 April and that’s made me think about how things have changed over the last two decades.

Back in 1992 the World Wide Web had a total of 130 sites and you had to dial in, BlackBerry was a fruit and you still listened to music on tape or CD.  There were no blogs, no Google, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Wikipedia and there were still nine planets in the solar system!

In 1992 you had to go to a store to buy something and you paid whatever price was on display.  You chose what to buy based on adverts and the recommendations of a few friends.  If you wanted to find people with the same interests as you, you went to clubs and your world was based on what was nearby.

Twenty years ago only a very few, forward looking companies had a Chief Technical Officer or Chief Information Officer and if they did they certainly didn’t sit on the executive team – technology just wasn’t that important to the running of the business.

Today everything’s changed - technology is at the heart of every business.  Everything runs on it.

From internal systems to stock ordering and logistics. From online payments to credit card transactions.  From data storage to real time data analysis. Transactions, communications, sales, record keeping – managing people, managing customers, managing shareholders – in fact, managing anything is all about the technology.

And, Colt sits right in the middle of this change  - and that’s very, very exciting.