Spark Salon Conversation Starters
March 20, 2012
Hidden Inflection Points
I
love the story of the light bulb. We often credit Edison for its
invention, but few know that his famous practical, inexpensive
incandescent bulb was essentially an iteration of another light bulb
invented a year earlier by a British scientist by the name of Joseph
Swan. And even fewer people may realize that by the time Edison
“invented” them in the late 1870s, electrically powered light bulbs had
been in slow, steady development for decades.
Better still: only a few months after Edison
received his patent, he’d already moved on to the next iteration, which
increased the bulb’s life a thousand-fold. The story of Edison and his
light bulb isn’t just a story of invention; it’s about the invariable
trajectory of progress.
Go to your closet and dig up one of those gadgets
you’ve got stored away from, say, ten or fifteen years ago. Dust it off,
give it a look, and try not to chuckle—go ahead, I dare you to not be
even the slightest bit amused by this antique. Remember how amazing that
thing was when you first got it? I bet at the time you probably weren’t
even thinking about how in just a few years it would be a barely
recognizable relic from a bygone era, laughable at best.
But at what point was it, exactly, that we evolved
from using those primitive things to equipping ourselves with the latest
mind-blowing technologies? Weren’t there at least a dozen or more
highly memorable inflection points along the way, where technology leaps
ahead and the curtain’s drawn back just far enough for us to glimpse
the future? Well, as it turns out, in the future (and make no mistake,
we’re officially living in it) invention isn’t all that much different
from the past: constant, incessant iteration, often so gradual we don’t
even notice it.
If you want to find ground zero for industry-wide
technological innovation, you might look to CES. The largest industry
trade show in the country, CES has long been the ultimate clearing house
for the tech industry’s advances, neatly packaged and presented at the
beginning of each new year—a beacon for the changes to come. So why is
it that just about everyone who follows technology will tell you that,
paradoxically, nothing much actually gets announced there?
Not literally, of course; my company, gdgt,
tracked nearly a thousand consumer electronics product launches in over
forty of the top verticals in early January, and I’ve heard estimates
that more than 20,000 new products were launched at CES 2012. But I’d be
willing to wager most people would be hard-pressed to name any of them.
As it turns out, we’ve learned to expect incredible new advances in
technology so constantly that we’re often unable to tell when we’ve
actually turned a corner.
I’m reminded of a quote by Marie Curie: “One never
notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.”
Like any good scientist in her lab, we build, iterate, experiment, ship,
and start over on thousands of devices and applications every year;
what failed miserably last time might, with some slight tweaks, be a
game-changer this time around. Or it might fail again, even harder.
Granted, there’s one industry behemoth whose
launches are as much about its products as they are about the vision of
the future those products represent (and, ultimately, portend). But even
Apple’s indirect impact is in many ways greater than its market share
would indicate, as it is setting the trends that the rest of the
technology industry force-multiplies as it races to compete.
The next time you buy a new device, consider the
endless iterations, bit by bit, component by component; the day-in and
day-out innovations, from protocols to minute standards—no matter how
behind-the-scenes—that serve as its foundation and enable its existence.
And then think about the home it will inevitably find in your closet
when you trade up to the next even more amazing thing (which you haven’t
yet imagined could even exist) at a moment you may not even realize is
actually an inflection point.
This article is commissioned by Qualcomm Incorporated. The views expressed are the author’s own.
end quote from:
http://spark.qualcomm.com/salon/hidden-inflection-points
Even though in one sense the above is an informercial of sorts, I still thought the ideas were presented well enough for me to share it here because if you think as an entrepreneur like I tend to there is a lot to learn from the way these ideas are presented. The speed of innovation is moving towards quantum levels partly because the technology we invent we can also train to invent and to innovate more 24 hours a day with or without us. There was a quote in the last 6 months by Technology prescient and inventor, Ray Kurzweil, a Graduate of MIT who said, "Computers and robots by 2030 will be milions of times more intelligent than humans." So, this also means if we turn them loose they will find a way to invent down any direction we send them. (Hopefully, it is a good and useful direction).
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