Out of the Box
AdVoice, Singapore, October 2003 issue
‘Technology is changing our world’ has become the biggest commonplace thinkable. Personally, I think it’s one of the biggest mistakes around. It’s not technology that changes the world – it’s the way it’s being applied.
I still remember my very first brush with the brave new world of IT. It was back in 1975, when one of my college professors explained to us the consequences of Moore’s Law, which was then 10 years old, and the effects of ongoing miniaturization. He stressed the fact that these promising new technologies opened endless vistas of possibilities that would have a profound effect on society, but ended with the historical words: “From now on, the limiting factor of new applications will not be the reach of technology, but our creativeness in finding ways to apply it.”
True even then, this observation has become ever more powerful since. Throughout the last few decades, there has been a dearth of viable new ideas but not of supporting technologies. The notable exception is the crazy five-year period from 1996-2000, otherwise known as the dotcom boom.
What happened during the boom illustrates another pitfall in making technology useful. Indeed, circumstances were ideal for anybody who came up with a cute new gadget, or an Internet-based service. But ideas alone are not enough. They need to be embedded in good designs or sound business models. And more often than not it takes a long time before the mass market adopts them. For instance, a recent study showed the average time from introduction of a new appliance to mass-market acceptation to be eight years.
But once it’s there, things can move fast. Internet, in the form of its predecessor Arpanet, was around since 1969; email was invented in 1971. But only after the development of the Internet browser MOSAIC in 1992, Internet and email really started to take off. It took another four years to gain rollercoaster speed, and we all know where the ride ended – down below, at the exit platform.
Since then, creativity has become an endangered species. Very recently, in an August 2003 interview with Business Week, famous technology guru Nicholas Negroponte said that his worst fears for the future were bad design and de death of innovation.
Negroponte is right. The dotcom bust left lethargy in its wake. Internet and telecom providers are trying to survive while servicing huge debts. They cannot afford anything that involves risk and investing money. Start-ups have gone bust or were gobbled up by large companies who stifled further innovation. Silicon Valley is all but a ghost town.
Case in question: spam. Email is not only the killer application of the Internet; it was also one of its early inventions. But since its inception, nothing much has happened. It hasn’t been improved, no new protocols were invented, just a few nice interfaces. And basically, this lack of innovation brought us spam.
The way email works reflects very much the way Internet was set up. Without a central authority, proper use is pretty much left to the user’s discretion. And that is precisely why spammers can get away with what they do. This is not about proper privacy laws or codes of conduct; this is all about criminal activities like spoofing sender addresses, faking websites, and even sending out worms like Sobig.F to find leaky relay servers.
The present email protocols leave lots of room for abuse of the medium. And there are plenty of people out there who have no qualms using every bit of that room. But there is also a lot of room for improvement of the protocols. Where are the Ray Tomlinsons of this world, who cobbled the whole thing together in five or six hours, back in 1971? Where are the innovators who will bring us the next step forward?
One reason might be worldwide standards. Email is being used by close to a billion people across the globe. Providing services to these people has become big business, with vested interests worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Thinking out of the box is not enough. Also needed is a coalition between a number of large corporations like AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft to agree on implementation. Life has become more complicated for all of us.
But Negroponte has one more lesson for all of us. Is he pessimistic? No, there will be a rebound. But it will not be the same as before. ‘Silicon Valley is certain to play a role, but it won't be the same centre of gravity it was before. In addition, new players will emerge in India, China, and to a lesser degree Latin America.’
‘Technology is changing our world’ has become the biggest commonplace thinkable. Personally, I think it’s one of the biggest mistakes around. It’s not technology that changes the world – it’s the way it’s being applied.
I still remember my very first brush with the brave new world of IT. It was back in 1975, when one of my college professors explained to us the consequences of Moore’s Law, which was then 10 years old, and the effects of ongoing miniaturization. He stressed the fact that these promising new technologies opened endless vistas of possibilities that would have a profound effect on society, but ended with the historical words: “From now on, the limiting factor of new applications will not be the reach of technology, but our creativeness in finding ways to apply it.”
True even then, this observation has become ever more powerful since. Throughout the last few decades, there has been a dearth of viable new ideas but not of supporting technologies. The notable exception is the crazy five-year period from 1996-2000, otherwise known as the dotcom boom.
What happened during the boom illustrates another pitfall in making technology useful. Indeed, circumstances were ideal for anybody who came up with a cute new gadget, or an Internet-based service. But ideas alone are not enough. They need to be embedded in good designs or sound business models. And more often than not it takes a long time before the mass market adopts them. For instance, a recent study showed the average time from introduction of a new appliance to mass-market acceptation to be eight years.
But once it’s there, things can move fast. Internet, in the form of its predecessor Arpanet, was around since 1969; email was invented in 1971. But only after the development of the Internet browser MOSAIC in 1992, Internet and email really started to take off. It took another four years to gain rollercoaster speed, and we all know where the ride ended – down below, at the exit platform.
Since then, creativity has become an endangered species. Very recently, in an August 2003 interview with Business Week, famous technology guru Nicholas Negroponte said that his worst fears for the future were bad design and de death of innovation.
Negroponte is right. The dotcom bust left lethargy in its wake. Internet and telecom providers are trying to survive while servicing huge debts. They cannot afford anything that involves risk and investing money. Start-ups have gone bust or were gobbled up by large companies who stifled further innovation. Silicon Valley is all but a ghost town.
Case in question: spam. Email is not only the killer application of the Internet; it was also one of its early inventions. But since its inception, nothing much has happened. It hasn’t been improved, no new protocols were invented, just a few nice interfaces. And basically, this lack of innovation brought us spam.
The way email works reflects very much the way Internet was set up. Without a central authority, proper use is pretty much left to the user’s discretion. And that is precisely why spammers can get away with what they do. This is not about proper privacy laws or codes of conduct; this is all about criminal activities like spoofing sender addresses, faking websites, and even sending out worms like Sobig.F to find leaky relay servers.
The present email protocols leave lots of room for abuse of the medium. And there are plenty of people out there who have no qualms using every bit of that room. But there is also a lot of room for improvement of the protocols. Where are the Ray Tomlinsons of this world, who cobbled the whole thing together in five or six hours, back in 1971? Where are the innovators who will bring us the next step forward?
One reason might be worldwide standards. Email is being used by close to a billion people across the globe. Providing services to these people has become big business, with vested interests worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Thinking out of the box is not enough. Also needed is a coalition between a number of large corporations like AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft to agree on implementation. Life has become more complicated for all of us.
But Negroponte has one more lesson for all of us. Is he pessimistic? No, there will be a rebound. But it will not be the same as before. ‘Silicon Valley is certain to play a role, but it won't be the same centre of gravity it was before. In addition, new players will emerge in India, China, and to a lesser degree Latin America.’
posted by Jos. at Wednesday, October 01, 2003
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