All Posts in Technology

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

In the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz invented calculus more or less concurrently. The question of who published first raged for decades.

In the 1800s, Sir Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both figured out how new species could arise from existing ones through the force of natural selection. Aware of each other’s work, in 1858 they presented their work together to the Linnaean Society.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray submitted patent applications for the telephone within hours of each other.

But in 1968, when Douglas Engelbart, who passed away recently, presented his live demonstration of a computing system that included the use of a mouse, videoconferencing, word processing, cut-and-paste, hypertext, revision control, and collaborative editing, he was the only person in the world who had put it all together (thanks to Randy Cunningham’s Honorary Unsubscribe  for providing, not only the details, but a link to a video of the presentation).

Not the only person in the world to have each of the ideas separately, though … Ted Nelson, for example, had been writing about hypertext since 1963.

We celebrate those who invent something important first. We celebrate those who make important scientific discoveries first. And yet, there’s a certain inevitability to all this. From the inside, these inventions and discoveries are more like races, in which the only question is who will cross the finish line first, than they are like the actions of lone explorers, boldly going where no one has gone before.

Maybe this is why we lionize great leaders more than great scientists and inventors: Without Washington, England probably would have defeated the colonists in the Revolutionary War; without Lincoln, and Grant, the Confederacy probably would have succeeded in seceding; without Roosevelt and Churchill the outcome of World War II would almost certainly have been very different.

Those specific, unique leaders were required. It’s doubtful that, with different leaders, we would have ended up with similar results. Take Lincoln: Had Stephen Douglas won the 1860 election the Confederacy might never have formed and slavery might still be legal. Or, more likely, a very different Civil War might have been fought at a very different time and in a very different way.

This is not true of the great scientists. Take Einstein: Had he never published, the current state of physics would be unaltered.

It’s a hard thought to swallow. Collectively, it’s the scientists of the world who have made our modern world possible. Just look around you and start subtracting everything you depend on that wouldn’t exist had the community of scientists never figured out the laws of thermodynamics, the aforementioned calculus, information theory, and another few dozens or hundreds of disciplines. It’s their byproducts that allow the world to operate with more than 7 billion inhabitants.

The secret is that scientists form communities, and it’s these communities that collectively deserve credit for what we as a species collectively know. The individual scientists who get the most credit are the ones who are just a bit smarter, just a bit quicker, and who work just a bit harder than the rest.

And, to be fair, in some cases are better politicians: Modern physics, for example, is a very expensive discipline; in order to make the big discoveries you first have to gain access to the big equipment.

Understand, I have nothing but respect for the great scientists, and you should too. While there’s no doubt many were and are driven by a sense of competition, they are far more driven by the desire to understand the universe just a bit better than anyone has understood it before.

Just as the great inventors, like Douglas Engelbart, were driven by the desire to make the world just a bit more capable than it was before.

The world of business has more in common with scientists and inventors than with the great political leaders: Should a company fail, while it’s hard on its employees and shareholders, otherwise it doesn’t matter a bit. If a department store closes its doors, shoppers will just buy the same merchandise from someone else; the same is true of just about anyone or any business in the market for goods or services.

Perhaps that’s why the self-importance of some CEOs is so amusing. Even those who help their companies win are, for the most part, simply shifting revenue from another company’s coffers to their own.

It’s just a race. What matters isn’t who wins it. What matters is that enough people are willing to run.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

 Technology, more than any other single factor, is what drives an economy forward.

Ironically, technology is, more than any other single factor, what holds individual companies back.

Is it what drives economies forward? Of course it is. In the absence of technological change, products and systems eventually optimize themselves, whether through the natural selection imposed by the marketplace, or by the eventual impatience of ingenious employees faced with an inefficient status quo.

Yes, painful as the message may be, without new technology, new-and-improved starts to mean the same old products in new packaging, just as without new technology, internal process improvement starts to mean fixing what’s broken by breaking what’s fixed: Once the stupid stuff is gone, process changes involve trade-offs. Or, to put it a different way, quality might start out being free, but it doesn’t stay that way.

Without new technology, business change is mostly a zero-sum game.

But with new technology? New technologies means new capabilities, some of which might prove useful. Startups base new products on it; established firms might build it into existing products (or else buy the more promising startups). People and companies with money to spend decide to buy the new or improved products, which means that by definition there’s now more wealth in the system than there was before.

And so, the new technologies have moved the economy forward.

Meanwhile, an average CIO in an average business has just survived (barely) an ERP implementation. Was it a good idea? Maybe.

For companies that want an integrated business architecture, ERP is a necessary … not sufficient, but necessary … precondition. Why? Because that’s what ERP does — provide an integrated informational view of an enterprise — and if you don’t buy and implement a commercial alternative you’ll just go through the enormous effort of building your own.

For companies pursuing a more entrepreneurial or holding-company approach, ERP mostly puts all the business units on a common accounting platform — nice, but not a big deal in the greater scheme of things.

Or else it puts handcuffs on the internal entrepreneurs and no-longer-independent business units.

But never mind all that. What matters this week is that the company in question now has an ERP suite in place. Or, if you like cloud stuff better, the company has bought a bunch of Salesforce licenses, configuring it to support its sales and sales management practices and integrating it into its (you know this is coming) ERP suite.

Or … pick your poison: Software that does important stuff for a company takes time and effort to implement. And then, every year, the company in question adds a swarm of small enhancements to tailor and adjust the system so it fits the company even better.

All this represents more than just sunk cost, although the sunk cost is nothing to sneeze at.

No, even more than sunk cost, the software a company runs on represents a collection of ingrained habits — the software becomes embedded in the business culture.

And now, to pursue new opportunities, or to compete with businesses that have newer and better systems to support their operations, or because the company’s old business model has run out of gas and the company has to do something different or die … for one of these reasons or maybe a different one, the company has to do something its current suite of applications won’t support very well.

Faced with the need to rip out and replace major chunks of the company’s business infrastructure, in order to support a new and untried business direction, it’s easy to find dozens of reasons to coast along for one more year, leveraging the sunk costs instead.

What’s the solution? Is there a solution?

According to legend, when American Airlines first invented frequent flier, it ran the whole program on electronic spreadsheets for three years, until it was able to build a “real” system to handle the program. True or not, the concept points the way: When trying out a new business concept, don’t invest in a robust, scalable systems architecture. Doing so will take everyone’s eyes off the ball. Instead, cobble together capabilities out of whatever cheap alternatives will be good enough to get by.

This is, after all, a new business. Nobody knows what it will really need.

And when nobody knows what they really need, there’s no point investing heavily in it.

Comments