CAMBRIDGE, MA. Things change. Mostly for the better… but not in the way we expect. Nothing shows this more than a college reunion. This column comes from my alma mater, the World Center for Pocket Protector Fashions, otherwise known as M.I.T.
Some examples:
- In 1958 we were mortified that the Soviet Union had beat us with a satellite in space. Theirs was larger than a basketball. We followed with one the size of a grapefruit. In 1997, we’ve not only won the space race; the Soviet Union must be referred to as “the former.”
- In 1958 about 28 women entered with the class of 1962. Measured against the nearly 900 entering freshman, women were what chemists call a “trace element.” Now they account for 40 percent of the student body… and the proportion is still increasing.
- As a student I wrote papers on an Olivetti portable typewriter. It weighed about six pounds and if I pounded hard enough on the keys I could make a carbon copy of what I was typing. Many secretaries said, with completely straight faces, that they didn’t know why people used Xerox copying machines when multi-part carbon sets would do just as well. Today, most people have never seen carbon paper and I am writing this on a new Dell laptop that weighs about six pounds but has more computing power than anything Norbert Weiner (the father of cybernetics) or Jay Forrestor (holder of an early patent in computer memory) ever dreamed of.
- For the class of 1962 the Internet did not exist. Neither did the World Wide Web. Now, current students have something in excess of 2,800 web sites, including a site for the “MIT Assassins Guild.” The combination of telecommunications and personal computing is creating a revolution that will surprise all of us: Seymour Papert, who has the unique title of “Lego Professor of Learning Research” at MIT, has declared that curriculum based education is heading for the scrap heap of history… simply by the force of voluntary participation in computer learning and the low cost of the internet.
You would think that all this innovation might develop in an orderly way from some enormous technological powerhouse or a national program.
It didn’t. And it won’t.
Indeed, the recent past shows that dominant players have regularly missed the boat and passed up opportunities to develop new areas. Here are some examples of technological blindness:
- In the late fifties, IBM was contemplating adding new equipment to its product line. They sponsored a market study and were told there was no significant market for a desktop copying machine. So they didn’t buy Xerox and missed the early development of electronic imaging.
- In the mid-sixties, Xerox invested heavily in computing… but passed up an opportunity to invest in Digital Equipment, the largest and most successful of the mini-computer companies.
- In the early seventies, Parker Brothers had an opportunity to invest in way to play games on a TV monitor… but declined because the market for puzzles and board games was clearly unlimited. Today they are minor players in one of the most rapidly growing areas of entertainment— computer based gaming — and companies that could not have won shelf space in a board game battle with Parker Brothers have created an entirely new retail distribution system to satisfy the demand for electronic games.
- In the late seventies, Digital Equipment examined the market for personal computers but decided it would never amount to more than a hobbyist market… worse, they made the same decision more than once. Now the distributed computing vision of mini-computer manufacturers is being fulfilled by powerful personal computers made by companies that didn’t exist in the late seventies.
Note that each of these companies— IBM, Xerox, Parker Brothers, and Digital Equipment— has been a dominant influence in a major market or technology but failed to find a significant role and lost a major opportunity.
Were they shortsighted?
Yes. But we all are.
Look for surprises.
This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
(c) A.M. Universal, 1997