The Importance of Disruptive Technologies
New technologies emerge in a far shorter time span than ever before in the history of mankind. While many of these technologies are incremental improvements over what is already available, others completely break from the pattern and redefine entire industries, change our mode of thinking about something, or just introduce new concepts to our knowledge bank.
In his 1997 best-selling book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen segregates new technology into two categories: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining technology relies on incremental improvements to an already established technology, while Disruptive technology is new, and unexpectedly displaces an established technology. By its very nature, disruptive technologies lack refinement, often have performance problems because these are new, appeal to a rather limited audience, and may not yet have a proven practical application.
While ‘marketability’ of new technologies depends on a number of factors, both sustaining and disruptive technologies have a larger role to play in our life. For instance, a disruptive technology like the ubiquitous Internet introduced a whole new way of linking information assets together, while gradual improvements of the first prototypes of the ‘Internet’ at CERN led to the public Internet as we know it today. Similarly, technologies like the ‘Search Engine’ came about in response to a need to find information in the hyperlinked environment. And it wasn’t really Yahoo or Google that really started the wave. It was a search algorithm called Archie, and the Gopher-enabled Veronica and Jughead, which were the precursors to what we see as ’search engines’ today.
Disruptive Technologies enable us to think in dimensions we didn’t think of, and in that lies their utility and power. These help us expand our knowledge base as a society and as individuals and solve problems we didn’t quite know as problems. The trouble is, it’s difficult to segregate a disruptive technology from chaos that surrounds research, from all the hyperbole that accompanies every new product or technology launch announcement. There is no mantra that can enable you to distinguish between a disruptive technology that can alter the landscape and marketing fluff most organizations indulge in. The only true test is time, the only testbed the entire mass of users on the Internet. And yet, we hardly have any other alternative to technology solving so many of our challenges today.
Imagine a technology so clean and green that it enables cars to run 200 miles on a single bottle of water, or a device that use nature itself to purify water and help soil regain fertility in millions of villages in Asia and Africa, or a medicine that can be embedded in the genetic code of an individual and enables the body to produce its own defence mechanisms. And then there’s business. How about giving the power to design an infrastructure so vast as Google’s to a kid in his backyard. There could be millions of other examples where disruptive technologies are not only desirable, but also the only answer.
Disruptive technologies emerge from the chaos that surrounds us and the best thing we could do is to create an environment which stimulates these technologies to come to the fore. We, including our leaders in business and society at large, have to be tolerant of chaos and build strategic capability to solve problems of the future rather than concentrating on today.
We owe it to ourselves, and to our future generations, to let disruptive technologies gain acceptance. There may be little we could do as individuals, besides being patient with technologists and researchers as they create the next big thing, but collectively, we can create an environment that lets distruption become the norm. Here’s to that next ‘disruption’ - whatever that is, whenever it comes on, wherever it happens!
Advantage Innovation
Creativity and Innovation are topics that many of you may have come across in literature, business seminars, and in working through tough problems every other day. Some attribute creativity to designers and artists, others regard innovation as the sole preserve of inventors and engineers. These are certainly not new concepts. And yet, very few people actually realize the importance these concepts have in the age we are living in.
Thousands of years ago, man learnt to use fire, tools, metals and other resources to help him meet the challenges of physical existence. New ideas were the basis of new civilizations - at Harappa, in Rome, and elsewhere. Empires were created through use of innovative strategies that relied on creative use of resources. Trade and commerce ushered in a new era for mankind. And a little over two hundred years ago, the ‘industrial revolution’ replaced manual labor with large scale factories that used machines. As the revolution spread from Britain to the rest of the world, competition took a new meaning. Sociologists and thinkers looked at all the change going on around them and came up with what we now know as ‘management’ to allow organizations to compete effectively. The accelerating pace of new discoveries and inventions made it imperative to keep pace with the change. And when the world wide web made Internet the pervasive force it is today, competition, partnerships and relationships quickly became global. This forced almost every organization to either keep up with the change, or risk losing the market presence to new competitors.
If you reflect on these events, or the history in general, you’ll notice a common thread running through time - that thread is of change, and of mankind’s continuing quest to find innovative solutions to the toughest problems. And more often than not, we have succeeded against all odds. Who would have thought a hundred years ago that man would set foot on moon, or that heart could be transplanted, or that machines would process information, satellites would help us communicate, or that we would have ‘eye in the sky’ telescopes like the Hubble. Today, we live in an age where we have to accept change as a part of everyday life. For instance, look at how quickly technology is changing in the mobile world - cellphones that are current today are almost ‘outdated’ in 6 months. Computers that are the fastest and the best today are nowhere in 2-3 years time. Five years ago, broadband was but a distant dream, and today, working at 2 or 4Mbps is considered normal. Skills that are current today will most certainly be outdated in 18-24 months with the way things are going. We have to adapt quickly, build new competencies and mould our thinking to compete effectively as individuals and as an organization.
Contrary to popular belief, creativity is not a divine gift and it is possible to develop these skills and qualities with rigorous training, self-discipline and developing processes to support creative problem solving and breakthrough thinking. Just a few years ago Apple Computer was almost written off as a ‘failed’ company by Michael Dell. Today, Apple’s market capitalization matches Dell inspite of a smaller revenue base. The only thing that made this almost unachievable feat possible was the healthy dose of creativity infused into the organization by Steve Jobs. The sleek new Macs, iPods and a revamped business model was all possible because the people at Apple - every single one of them - believed they could achieve the extraordinary. And they did. The result was a smaller, more nimble and fleet-footed organization that could respond to changing consumer trends especially in an area like personal entertainment electronics with its iPod range. In contrast, a huge organization like Sony with pioneering position in the last few decades with its ‘Walkman’ product line has been a miserable failure in this segment.
If there’s one mantra that powers winning ideas, it is this - stay well, change, innovate, adapt! I wish this, and more, for your life ahead!
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish!
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, CEO and Co-Founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks—including death itself—at the Stanford University’s 114th Commencement on Sunday in Stanford Stadium. Wearing jeans and sandals under his black robe, Jobs delivered a keynote address that spanned his adoption at birth to his insights into mortality after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer about a year ago. In plainspoken terms, his address struck a balance between the obstacles he has encountered during his notably public life and the lessons he has gleaned—for example, from his high-profile ousting in 1985 from the computer company he helped start.
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I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky Ð I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me Ð I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything Ð all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Photosynth(esis)
It’s not everyday that you come across a product that makes you sit up and just wonder if you’ve been sleeping all along. And I can simply say there is one upcoming product that made me feel just like that. Never before in my 18 years of working with computers have I encountered a product for which the word ‘wow’ wouldn’t suffice. I guess Google’s search engine is the only technology that comes second in my mind…
I agree it might just be the lure of a sexy new technology. But then, if you just go through what Microsoft’s Photosynth is, well, you’ll realize what I’m saying. So, what is this Photosynth? Nothing much really, if you just look at what it says it does. But then, if you look at what goes behind the front-end and what the ultimate objective of the project is, it’s nothing short of ‘amazingly wowwwwww’.
Photosynth is a product that Microsoft Labs (Microsoft’s Research group) is creating with the University of Washington. The product, currently in its ‘Technical Preview’ release, allows users to:
Wait, there’s more…this product is much more than a photo-viewing tool. If you work through what’s going on behind the scenes, you’ll know why it’s so difficult to do and the ground-breaking idea behind the product. Working through this application, theoretically at least, we could create a fully virtual model of the entire world. Imagine sitting in your home and roaming the streets of Manhattan, zooming in and out wherever you want, as if you were controlling a camera. Or perhaps, imagine going through the Taj Mahal from the inside without having to move from your chair. One image you took during a vacation could become the precursor of reliving the complete experience, in 3D reality, all hyperlinked visually and enabled with the social perspective. In a way, this is the next logical level of the web - extending a text-hyperlinking model to a visual hyperlinking model.
I am pretty sure this technology will enable the creation of new business models. Imaging people constructing virtual models that mimic reality and take you through guided tours, and then charge you a small fee for doing it. Imagine being through every street en route before venturing out to meet someone. Imagine the next level of Google Earth. Imaging businesses again capitalizing on their physical location to establish brands. Imagine!
I am sure there are hundreds of ways you could use this and I am even more convinced there will be hundreds of ways people will use this technology beyond what its inventors even thought of. And that is precisely what gets me all hyped up about this stuff. It’s an amazing technology all right. But what’s more amazing is that it frees people up to build on it…it’s like an enabler, a precursor to something larger.
The months and years ahead will bear testimony to whether Photosynth lives up to the GIANT expectations that it has created, or whether the hype dies down. Let’s hope, for our sake, and technology’s sake, that we see more products and technologies like these.
For those of you who are interested, take a look at the Photosynth Website and tell me what you think!
Outsourcing Readiness
Outsourcing is no longer a buzzword it once was. From the mid-80s to now, it has reshaped the business landscape in a way that no other management concept has. And it has done so quietly, without the usual hype that so surrounds most new initiatives.However, there have been a fair amount of failures where outsourcing hasn’t quite delivered value. In most cases, this has been the result of poor planning and lack of understanding of how to prepare as your organization looks to outsource its business processes and technology development.
The attached presentation discusses some important concepts related to outsourcing readiness and was delivered by me at an event organized by San Diego State University and its Entrepreneurial Management Center on June 7, 2006. This presentation highlights some of these key challenges and highlights the role of an assessment in mitigating risks associated with outsourcing.
For more details on the event see
http://sdsu.theitpros.net/page.cfm?pageid=311.
Data, Information, Knowledge…
I remember the days when data was data, and information was a structured, usable form of that data. And then came knowledge, and a horde of definitions distinguishing data from information, and information from knowledge. We moved on from ‘data’ management to ‘information’ systems. And then we got ‘knowledge’ in knowledge management systems, knowledge bases, knowledge repositories, and more such systems.
I am often asked if this distinction even matters anymore. After all, Google has taken on itself the task of codifying and storing all the ‘knowledge’ that humankind has accumulated over the ages, and for most people, it seems to be succeeding in doing just that. (Although I beg to disagree)!! Imagine a world without Google today. Yes, it’s scary, but is it ‘knowledge’ that we get on Google, or merely ‘information’. Or is it ‘data’? Again, does it matter?
Well, yes, it does matter. I believe it would be wrong to classify all the information a person can get on Google as ‘knowledge’. Knowledge isn’t merely an assemblage of facts, howsoever structured. And it isn’t just the ideas all of us carry in our brain. Understanding the nature of knowledge necessarily introduces the concept of context - what is ‘knowledge’ may be commodity information tomorrow; what is knowledge for one, may be nothing more than just words for another person; what is knowledge in one situation might be useless in another. And the biggest attribute that truly distinguishes knowledge from information and data is the fact that it’s ’sticky’ - it cannot be so easily shared or transmitted from one person to the other. It takes practice, understanding, and time to acquire knowlege, make it grow, and most importantly, to apply this knowledge.
What Google or other search and discovery engines can present to a user is a portal to the world of information. How this information is assimilated, turned into knowledge inside each individual’s head, and applied to a ‘higher cause’, is where the difference lies.
I am not a purist or a philosopher/scientist in search of the final answer. And yet, I believe understanding the difference is vital if we have to achieve our goals as a society. Some may be surprised that the roots of this article lie as far back as 1945. In July that year, Dr. Vannevar Bush, the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the United States, published an article in The Atlantic Monthly called “As We May Think”. And for decades, this article has been the guiding force for generations of scientists and information analysts. And if you’re a budding engineer or an information analyst with experience in single digit years, I am sure you’ll be surprised if you read this article. Surprised because it was written 61 years ago, but more because the challenges Dr. Bush mentioned in the article with respect to codifying, sharing and using knowledge still remain valid.
Knowing what makes information valuable in a given context will help us design better systems for managing content, collaboration and bridging the gap between knowledge ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and allow the ‘Semantic Web’ to transcend structural codification and relate to a user’s needs. And that’s the revolution we all can look forward to in the years ahead. In my future articles I’ll try and discuss more about how this Semantic Web is different from what we know of the web today, and how it’ll change our lives like never before!
Lingua Franca of the new Web!
As the web evolves from merely a storehouse of the ‘global knowledge’ to a pervasive support system to individuals, organizations, governments, and every social community for that matter, there is a growing need to utilize this ubiquity to allow us to do things that we never even thought were possible, and perhaps most importantly, add value to our everyday tasks, add value to life.
This blog is simply a collection of my thoughts on what is emerging as a completely new model of organizing information and building knowledge, shaping the way businesses use technology. Some call it the New Web, others prefer the more techie term Web 2.0, others just refer to the underlying principles of innovation and the very human nature of enterprise. Whatever the nomenclature we use, the fact remains that this new model for the web’s evolution has vital bearing on our future as individuals, as businesses. And even though we can never be prescient enough to look too far ahead and make the mistake of ‘predicting’ what’s coming on the web, better understanding of the trends and issues can help us take better decisions and adapt to a new world.
True to the basic character of blogs, this blog isn’t a textbook, neither does it pretend to be a one-stop guide to the new web. This is simply a collection of thoughts, ideas and some insights into what’s going to be a significant shift in the way we look at the web, the ideas that are shaping our world, and how we can be a part of this change rather than just standing around as bystanders. I named it the iDialect for two reasons - one, it sounds good :), and second, it represents my belief that the semantics of the web are changing and it will take a new way of thinking to make the best of the opportunity that the ‘New Web’ provides.
