The "Flip Test"

Prof.  Andrew McAfee at HBS has a brain twisting post using a comment from a panel he was on:

""Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.'  It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries.  You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply.  Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?"

Fascinating. Something every technology vendor or participant, in my opinion, should be game playing, because the "flip" may scaringly become reality - and soon - in their markets

Some of the "flip questions" I would ask:

a) All technology vendors - What if consumer/retail brands dominated enterprise technology markets?
b) Outsourcers - What if Intel was a service provider?
c) Software vendors - what if companies only bought business process functionality as an outsourced service?
d) Hardware vendors - what if companies had little or zero IT capital budgets and little physical space for gear?
e) US Telecom vendors - what if US broadband/mobile markets were like the auto market and customers were used to Japanese and Korean standards?
f) CIOs - what if you did not report to the CFO?

I have one for myself. What if I flipped lives with Bill Gates? I know one thing for sure - I would not spend much time reading his blog -)