Did the title of this blog article catch your attention? It might have because you may be offended, mad, angry, happy, excited, or have a combination of those feelings. These views are my views of the industry that we all love and enjoy working in. The premise of this post is to engage and empower you to defend the industry that is lacking innovation, so much that I believe it has become stagnant. Some of you are probably picking up your phone now to call me and provide me with explanations, well no need to, but I will gladly always take your call here.
In terms of innovation, where is it? Innovation’s meaning is a new idea, method, device, or the introduction of something new. The products I see are the same as they have been for the past 25 years. Some of them have been enhanced or modified to address certain problems that have arisen but has anything been a real game changer? A game changer is something substantial that really changes how we live as a society, think email for example. Before email we relied on phones in our office and snail mail, now we can send messages to each other in a flash. So has there been anything in the past 25 years in metal construction that has had the same effect? Please do suggest something in the comments below, I would love to hear how some product became a game changer in the industry.
Next let’s discuss how the industry is stagnant. The definition of stagnant is characterized by lack of development,advancement, or progressive movement. How many of you are upset now? I hope all of you, because your industry is at that point, consider what other industries are doing. A quick example would be someone like Western Digital who for many years had a strong market share in external data storage. Remember those days of buying a server for your business, or a small 1 GB hard drive that you could attach to your computer? Well, they still do that, but they’ve moved forward with providing cloud computing storage. That is precisely what I mean by advancement, development, and movement. The metal construction industry not so much, prove to me where and I will gladly write a blog post about why I was wrong.
So I’m going to wait on some of you to comment and even email me directly about my opinion, because I want to hear if I am wrong. I know some will say solar has changed metal roofing right? So what solar and photovoltaic cells were around in the 1980’s, just like the application of electric vehicles was done in the late 1800’s. As I stated before prove me wrong and I will gladly admit it. Now I’ll stop and wait for all of you to defend your industry, truthfully, I believe many of you are the like the industry, stagnant and lacking innovation. Have you ever heard of graphene? No! Right, you are just proving my point. The challenge has been laid down, go ahead.