Consulting Lessons Learned 5: The time machine
Let’s say you need to find out the development of the product portfolio of a small company in the last 10 years. Or you want to see how the price for a certain product evolved over time. What would you do?
Unfortunately, simply visiting the company’s website or doing a google search won’t help much. And even Wikipedia often won’t know these details.
But there is a simple solution: Ever heard about the Wayback Machine? The organization behind it makes a copy of most websites on the web in more or less regular time intervals. That way, you can travel back in time and see how the content of a website is evolving.
Simply go to http://web.archive.org/ and try it out for yourself! This tool already helped me several times when doing research for a consulting project and I’m sure it will help you too!
