Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Disruptive Tech, Again

I had a couple of people come up to me after the page about disruptive technologies and offer up their own examples. Mine were more personal–I have a box of once-expensive cables to hook up peripherals I no longer own to computers I no longer own, either. But all you have to do is look around to see other examples.
The United States Postal Service is in trouble. This was one of Ben Franklin's ideas, for crying out loud, but its usefulness may be coming to an end. My mother loves to talk of a time when she could count on twice-a-day service. As she put it, you could invite someone to dinner that night in the morning mail, and receive word back that afternoon that they were planning on attending. Pretty cool, huh? And this cost a nickel or less.

But it was a time before e-mail. It was a time before "everyone" had a telephone, too. It was the only way we had to do these kinds of things, so it's the way things worked. And generations depended on a system like this. It was a part of their daily life that I suspect went largely unexamined and unquestioned. Of course we people handling paper and bringing it to our homes. How do you communicate with faraway others?

In hindsight, mistakes are always more easily seen. Geeze, maybe first class postage did get kind of out of hand there at the end. Maybe second class postage and third class postage should have been more spendy—that would have cut down on the tonnage of catalogs and sales flyers and saved a forest or two, perhaps. With less "Junk Mail" clogging the system, there would have been less wear-and-tear on all of the equipment, including the letter carriers.

Maybe having to go to a box down the street, instead of to your very own door makes "The Mail" a little less personal and a little less precious. It was a matter of architecture. The Mail was so dependable, so ordinary and so necessary that we put little slots in front doors to keep from having to open a door and retrieve the daily delivery. In an age of increasing precision and accuracy (thanks in large part to computers), can we accept something like approximate mail delivery? A nickel used to bring a handwritten note from your grandmother from Ohio all of the way to your very own front door. Now, fifty cents gets your electric bill only as close as your neighbor's driveway? Really? That's the best we can do?

Netflix put a serious hurt on the mom-and-pop video rental business, and on local cable-TV and satellite franchises. Now, Netflix itself is in danger of becoming redundant as various concerns struggle with the problems of squirting movies and TV shows into our homes. It may be that the electronic side of their business, the "Net" part, eventually takes over everything. Or it may be that someone else will get it right, or get it righter, or offer it cheaper. Maybe one day we'll all watch TV piecemeal via some kind of a super-service like Apple's iTunes. I love HBO, but don't care much for boxing, so if I can get all of HBO's movies and original programming for $9 instead of the $12 my cable company charges, I'll probably go that route.

Economics plays a role in these decisions, but ultimately it seems like the best technologies eventually make it, in a survival-of-the-fittest kind of way. If your costs are lower this way than that, or if speeds are faster here than there or if your technology is massively cheaper than someone else's, then you're going to win. If not, then there doesn't seem to be much that you can do, except try to hang on.

In the 1980s we heard magical stories of wizards working on ways to get data from the same wire that gave us Skin-a-max. It was hugely expensive at the time, and not particularly fast by today's standards, but everyone saw it coming. Same with DSL on the phone lines. Where once we had two phone lines, so we could be online and still order pizza at the same time, now you can carry on all kinds of up- and downloading activity while, well, ordering pizza.

There are a lot of dial-up plans available, offering cheap internet access. But time is money, here, too. I know a lot of cheap people, but I don't know anyone with dial-up internet, any more.

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