Oh, this is great. Kudos to Rob LoCascio who in this article lays out the reasons why we are witnessing the last days of the website.
Basically, in response to Google and its crawlers, every website looks the same, has a similar architecture and is moves customer experience away from personalisation, to something homogeneous, bland, forgettable.
My colleagues Tim Hughes and Adam Gray have written already about the death of digital advertising and email. And now it looks as if www.acme.com is going the same way.
Ok, I don't agree that we are at the url end of days, but the underlying argument is right. Google has made websites boring. And customers will seek excitement and personalisation elsewhere. Social media, anyone?
I am going to make a bold prediction based on my work with 18,000 companies and bringing conversational commerce to life: In 2018, we will see the first major brand shut down its website. The brand will shift how it connects with consumers — to conversations, with a combination of bots and humans, through a messaging front end like SMS or Facebook. We are already working with several large brands to make this a reality. When the first website ends, the dominoes will fall fast. This will have a positive impact on most companies in transforming how they conduct e-commerce and provide customer care. For Google, however, this will be devastating.
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