In contrary. Digitalization is going on since the 1950s, and it is gaining more and more momentum. When IMR managed for the first time to supply an OCR system to famous publishing house Reader's Digest in 1954, using optical character recognition to digitalize sales reports, the era of turning paper into bits and bytes threw the first shadow. The pivotal year was 1959 when a whole flurry of digitalization technologies got introduced. Ever since that, entrepreneurial spirit has turned every analog stone to find digitalization potentials and thus business opportunities. Drawings, once a domain of pen and paper, became CAD in 1959, the same year the first-ever scan of a photograph succeeded. GPS and its digital positioning and later navigation capability followed in 1980. A decade later, the World Wide Web started. The rest you can read on Wikipedia - yet another cornerstone of the digital age.
It is almost amusing how some prophets of doom try to maintain the stance that Digitalization is the first Industrial Revolution that is announced before it even happens. They post such opinions on blogs and digital social media platforms and afterward call their partner on a Voice over IP line to ask if they should order dinner online. Let us be crisp regarding this: It took a century for the First Industrial Revolution to build up enough proverbial steam to help lift Electrification off the ground in the 1880s. Just half a century later that sparked Robotization, followed a mere quarter-century later by Digitalization. The pace is amazing.
2009 has been a pivotal year for platform businesses, with the likes of Uber, Airbnb, and many others launching their web services. Their businesses stand on the shoulders of giants - enormously powerful industrial platforms. Those are rooted in the fertile soil of omnipresent electric power, world-spanning communication systems, and very affordable computing power. That is the tailwind that helps Digitalization to accelerate. But the real impact will come when the tide turns, and Digitalization helps to re-invent all these industrial technologies and their business ecosystems.
So far, the pace between recent Industrial Revolutions has doubled from one to the next. If that sequence continues - 100, 50, 25 years - then the next big thing should have started 12.5 years after the 1959 advent of Digitalization. And guess what: in 1971, Paul Berg managed the first-ever genetic editing by combining DNA material from two viruses. I do not think that I need to say more.