Since I began writing for Forbes in 2014, my sixtieth and final article of the year is an analysis of the top articles from the year just past. Here, then, is my take on 2018.
Digital Transformation Makes the List
In fifth place this year: Digitization, Digitalization, And Digital Transformation: Confuse Them At Your Peril (33,926 views). What’s most surprising about this article is how many people appreciated the clearing up of confusion over these terms – even though digital transformation has been a hot topic for half a decade now.
Comments on LinkedIn were quite positive, although it’s not clear if people are using these terms any more precisely now that I’ve written the article.
Enterprise Vendor Stories Can Still Be Hot
I write about enterprise software vendors all the time, but such articles rarely are my most popular. The one exception, in fourth place: Three Things IBM Must Do To Keep Red Hat Acquisition From Sinking The Company (37,684 views).
My angle on this story was to be as provocative with my recommendations as possible, even though the chances the company will actually take my advice are near nil.
After all, can you really see
The real question here, of course, is whether IBM will remain a going concern in its current form. CEO
Ginni Rometty has made some risky bets during her tenure – but so far, they haven’t fared too well. Is the Red Hat deal her savior – or her downfall? Only time will tell.
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Cryptocurrency Nabs the Top Three Places
I’ve been a crypto skeptic in the pages of Forbes for four years now. In the early days, the crypto fanatics would flame my articles relentlessly on social media. The attacks have since died down, perhaps because many of the fans realize I’ve been right all along – or at least, I can only hope that’s the explanation.
In third place this year is my attempt at a sequel: Seven More Lies Bitcoin (And Altcoin) Fans Tell Themselves (41,420 views). This article follows up my all-time most popular article, which I published in December 2017: Seven Lies Bitcoin Fans Tell Themselves (And Anyone Else Who Will Listen) (481,102 views).
While the sequel didn’t even hit 10% of the original, making it more of a Jaws 2 than a Godfather 2, it still gave me a wonderful excuse to include the original in this article, in spite of being from 2017.
In fact, the outsized success of the ‘Seven Lies’ article still boggles the mind. Nearly half a million people, arguably more than the entire crypto community itself. The fact that I called the Bitcoin bubble about a week before it popped didn’t hurt, either.
Crime and More Crime
One of the most important themes of my crypto-related articles is how crime-infested the entire industry is. Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are among the worst offenders, with well over 90% outright scams.
In my second place article, I called out one of the biggest: Telegram ICO: Scam Among Cryptocurrency Scams (47,506 views). What makes Telegram a scam? It has no business model. In other words, it has no intention of making any money.
What do I call a business with no business model? A hobby. And what do I call an ICO for a business with no business model? A scam.
And the Winner Is…
That brings us to first place: We Need To Shut Bitcoin And All Other Cryptocurrencies Down. Here’s Why. (262,695 views). This article also garnered a surprisingly outsized viewership, second only to my ‘Seven Lies’ article.
As with the IBM/Red Hat article, the central trope to the ‘Shut Bitcoin Down’ article is making a recommendation that is extraordinarily unlikely to happen. Unlike IBM’s case, however, the problem here is that shutting down cryptos is practically impossible, due to their inherently decentralized, permissionless nature.
Of course, cryptos’ decentralized, permissionless nature is precisely why we need to shut them down.
With the descending price of cryptos since the bubble popped, their utility is becoming increasingly crime-focused – both their use as well as their mining.
In other words, crypto has become a cancerous parasite on the world of finance, sucking its blood to keep the nefarious goals of the true benefactors of the technology in business. Regulators and financiers alike, however, have been slow to realize just how bad the situation is.
Many cancers are survivable if you deal with them early. Wait too long, however, and they’re usually fatal.
I will continue to beat this drum as loudly as I can. I hope you’ll join me.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, IBM is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. The author does not own, nor does he intend to own, any cryptocurrency or other cryptotokens, neither long nor short. Image credit: neepster.