STC is broken?

[Nancy Allison]

I wonder if anything is really wrong with the STC model, or if we're all just hunkered down because of the contracting economy. I remember a lot of excitement back in the 80s and 90s, and it seemed as if a noticeable percentage of companies adopted new technologies pretty much as they came out. Example: the switch from WinHelp to HTML Help.

I say "a noticeable percentage" because that translated into a good proportion of us needing to learn these new technologies, and that meant opportunities and new knowledge to share, and thus people who were willing to go back out to a meeting after a long day at work. 

There are probably as many new, exciting possibilities now, but I think the proportion of companies adopting them is smaller, thus the critical mass of motivated people is smaller. Maybe I'm just stuck in a conservative area, but the last time I got to do something technically exciting and new was 10 years ago. I've been working in Framemaker-to-PDF and MS Word ever since, on a print document model, and that's for five or six different contracts.

Let's say we started having small meetings in people's homes, or 20-minute breakfast meetings along heavily trafficked commuter routes, or instant-messaged conversations, or weekend retreats, or Virtual Reality exercises -- would these innovations revitalize STC in the face of discouraging times, or would they be gimmicks that didn't change the fundamentals?