Digital transformation, yes. Strategy, no.

I got my first cassette player for my 11th birthday in January 1975.

I was therefore royally pissed off when I wasn’t allowed to take it school a couple of years later. There were some rules about what kind of musical entertainment you could have in your study. Yes, it was a boarding school. Sorry.

If you were in the Fourth Form or the Remove (i.e., the two most junior years), you were only allowed a radio, so I had to make do with a tiny transistor until I replaced it with a beautiful Bang and Olufsen Beolit 707. It cost me £65 (over £300 today) and I loved its sleek design and sliding controls. Unfortunately, it fell off the roof of my car a few years later and never recovered.

However, when I reached the Fifth Form, I was allowed my cassette recorder. To my delight I found I could wire it up to the B&O radio for extra volume – but not stereo – but this was nothing compared to what you got to do in the Sixth Form: you could have hi-fi.

Now, buying a hi-fi was a complicated and dangerously personal business in them days. If you turned up with an Amstrad amplifier, you would be a laughing-stock forever. If your entire system was from the same company, such as Technics, you might as well have wandered around with a label on your back saying “I know nothing about hi-fi” because it demonstrated you hadn’t taken the whole thing seriously. No. If your hi-fi system was going to be deemed acceptable, it had to comprise separate components from different manufacturers, components carefully chosen after reading multiple copies of What Hi-fi? from cover to cover.

So, I got a JVC record deck. An affordable, but respectable brand. My amplifier, sorry, my amp, was also by JVC (so I was dangerously close to being a one-brand-man) but it had five red flashing LEDs on the front which looked really cool and handles on the side. My speakers were KEF Celeste Mk IIIs. They were covered in black cloth which was unusual. Most speakers in the 1970s were given wood-effect cabinets. It wasn’t an expensive set up, but it passed muster.

Then in 1981, I got a car. Instantly, I bought a Pioneer cassette/radio and speakers to go in it. I also bought a Pioneer cassette deck to go with my hi-fi so that I could record my albums to play in the car. Yes, it was home-taping. Yes, I was “killing music” but when you’ve already shelled out £4.99 for the vinyl version of a new album, you’re hardly likely to spend another fiver on the cassette when you can buy a bundle of TDK C90s and create your own tapes for a fraction of the price. So, I can now play vinyl and cassettes.

Then in 1985, CDs appeared. At first, there were two on the market: Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and Nigel Kennedy’s recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. That was your choice. CD players were also very expensive. I’d just started earning and they were well out of my league.

In 1993, I got married. My new wife looked at my beloved, and now rather ancient, hi-fi and quite rightly stated that we should move with the times. So, we bought a Kenwood stacking system, complete with record deck (I insisted), radio, CD player and twin cassette decks (which were good for high-speed dubbing). My hi-fi went in the loft.

All was fine for a few years, but just after the millennium, MP3 players and iPods started appearing. Our record deck packed up. We bought a Philips portable CD/radio thing with a docking station for an iPod. Happy days.

As the world was going digital, my wife gave me a record deck for converting vinyl to MP3s. I never got the hang of and it used to shuffle all the tracks about. When you’ve listened to an album many, many times, you know the track that’s coming next. When you get something different, it’s just wrong, wrong, wrong. The deck is also in the loft.

It took us a while to get into streaming music – and even longer to grudgingly accept that £7.99 a month was a small price to pay for not having to listen to Spotify’s ghastly ads – but we got there in the end.

And so we bought a Sonos for the kitchen. Not a talking one, mind you. Then we bought another for the sitting room. Today, we just stream music via our phones, laptops and tablets and play it via headphones, the device or the nearest speaker.

So, that is the story of my digital transformation and it brings me to the point of this rather rambling blog. THERE WAS NO STRATEGY. There was no plan, no forward thinking, no anxious consideration of where I stood digitally versus friends. (I do recall one friend proudly playing me a CD in the mid-80s – I think it was Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms – and getting me to listen to the silences between the tracks. “Listen! No hiss!”) It didn’t bother me that other people were having more up-to-date digital experiences – and it still doesn’t.

No, I simply replaced my kit with new stuff when the time came and that, I believe, is what most businesses do. You start out with one piece of kit, outgrow it (or break it), and look around to see what the latest technology has to offer. Buy well, and your purchase should do you for several years. Besides, if something is still working, there’s no need to spend money on replacing it, especially when there’s probably something else within the business that does need replacing. Why the big tech companies insist on scaring the pants of businesses by telling them that they need to undergo a top-to-bottom digital transformation and DO IT NOW, I really don’t know. (Well, I do; it’s to sell stuff.) Most businesses are simply trying to survive at the moment. They’re aware of the future and that they need to prepare, but they’re more concerned with today than they are with tomorrow.

So, my strategy – if you can call it that – is simply buy what you need, when you need it, not when someone else tells you to. And if that means you’re not ahead of the times, so be it. You can reassure yourself with the knowledge that you’re spending your money on what you need now.

Photo: R. Halfpaap