I’ve been away for a few days not by choice but because this blog has been under continual attack so I couldn’t log-in. I must have offended someone. Anyway, I appear finally to be back.
I had lunch last week with my old friend Aurel Kleinerman, an MD who also runs a Silicon Valley software company called MITEM, which specializes in combining data from disparate systems and networks onto a single desktop. Had the Obama Administration known about MITEM, linking all those Obamacare health insurance exchanges would have been trivial. Given MITEM’s 500+ corporate and government customers, you’d think the company would have come to the attention of the White House, but no.
Lesson #1: before reinventing any wheels first check the phone book for local wheel builders.
Aurel, who is Romanian, came to the USA in 1973 to get a PhD in Math at Cornell (followed later by an MD from Johns Hopkins) and learned English by watching the Senate Watergate hearings on TV. “They were on every night in the student center so I came early to get a seat close to the TV,” he recalled. “That meant I also got to watch reruns from the original Star Trek series that seemed to always play right before the hearings. So I guess I owe my English skills to a combination of Watergate and Star Trek.”
Our lunch discussion wasn’t about Watergate or Star Trek, but about supply and demand and how these concepts have changed in our post-industrial age.
“Demand drove supply in the industrial age,” said Aurel. “You needed more steel to build cars so a new steel mill was built. But today it seems to me that supply is actually driving demand.”
He’s right. Intrinsic to every technology startup company is an unmet need not on the part of the market but on the part of the founder. They want a device or a piece of software that doesn’t exist so they start a company to build it. Customers eventually appear, attracted by the new innovation, but it didn’t come about because they asked for it.
“You can’t rely on customers to tell you what to build,” said Aurel. “They don’t know.”
And so it has been for at least 30 years. When Lotus 1-2-3 was being developed in the early 1980s the developers were very proud of their macro functions, which they saw as a definite improvement on VisiCalc, the pioneering spreadsheet that dominated the market then. But when the Lotus marketing folks asked potential customers what improvements they’d like, not one mentioned macros. Yet when focus groups were shown the new software these same people declared macros a hit. “That’s what I want!” Only they hadn’t known it.
For that matter, VisiCalc itself didn’t come about because of customer demand: nobody back then knew they even needed a spreadsheet.
We see this effect over and over. Look at cloud computing, for example. It’s easy to argue that the genesis of cloud was Google’s desire to build its own hardware. Google was nailing motherboards to walls at the same time Excite (Google’s main search competitor at the time) was spending millions on Sun computers in a sleek data center. Google’s direction turned out to be the right one but that wasn’t immediately evident and might well have never happened had not Larry and Sergey been so cheap.
Extending this concept, Amazon’s decision to sell retail cloud services wasn’t based on demand, either. No entrepreneurs were knocking on Amazon’s door asking for access to cloud services. That’s not how it was done then. Every startup wanted their own data center or at least their own rack in someone else’s data center. Amazon embracing virtualization and shared processing changed everything, at the same time knocking a zero out of the cost for new software startups.
If there’s a lesson to be embraced here, then, it’s If we build it they might come.
Apple’s success has long been based on this principle. Nobody was demanding graphical computers before the Macintosh arrived (the three I can easily recall that preceded the Mac — Xerox Star, Lisa, and the UCSD pSystem — all failed). There were smart phones and tablets and music players before the iPhone, iPad and iPod, too, yet each Apple product stimulated demand by appealing not to what customers said they wanted but to what customers innately needed.
The big question — make that the constant question — is what will customers want next? What’s the next big platform, the next big innovation? I have some ideas about that I’ll share with you later in the week.
What do you think is coming next?
“the three that preceded the Mac both failed”
I love this sentence. 🙂
Oops. I originally had it at two (Apple Lisa and Xerox Star) but then I remembered the UCSD p-System. So you are correct and I am wrong. Does anyone but me remember the p-System — an interpreted UI so slow that you could get a cup of coffee sometimes while waiting for the screen to refresh?
Sadly, I remember the p-System. I never saw one, but read about them.
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Some of the early AI systems (LISP based) had GUI interfaces. Did these precede or follow the MAC?
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Didn’t Microsoft use p-code as its programming language in the early days of Windows and GUI applications?
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Am I showing my age too?
Ah, memories …
Western Digital used to make a board that implemented UCSD p-system. I worked on systems built around that board and with 8″ floppies too. It was actually quite a decent machine for it’s time, i.e. early 1980’s. I also used UCSD Pascal on Apple IIe, it was the ants pants until Turbo Pascal came out and I never looked back. Somehow Delphi never quite made the same impact for me.
I actually had a p-system on my first (Z80A-based) computer. It supported another language besides Pascal but I forgot what it was….
I actually have the original manuals and diskettes for the early versions of Turbo Pascal and Sidekick. Yeah, Delphi never really caught on. That was kinda the beginning of the time when Borland turned weird. They really didn’t want to support and be compatible with Microsoft’s libraries and interfaces. While it was an annoyance with Delphi, it proved to be a deal breaker in C and C++. Why Object-PAL? Why not a more true SQL language instead? They had a truly impressive DBase clone. Throw in a GUI and some SQL and they would still own the PC database market today. They didn’t need to buy Ashton-Tate, and they didn’t do anything with what they acquired from the purchase. In the end buying Ashton-Tate was probably the fatal blow that did Borland in.
Don’t forget the Perq. It had decent performance due to a bit-slice processor optimized for moving pixels on the screen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ
I don’t remember any pre-Macintosh UCSD Pascal systems with GUIs. The version that ran on the Apple ][ I remember being slow, mostly because of what it tried to accomplish off two 5.25″ floppies and 64k of RAM. Sage Microcomputer had a pretty decent p-system machine that could support multiple users, but it was all over serial terminals. A friend’s dad owned one and used a Televideo 925 terminal with it.
I do remember the USCD P-System. The school I attended, UC Irvine, had a bunch of them for undergraduate CompSci students. When I discovered I could get a card for my Apple ][ to run it, I was able to do my homework … at home!
It was vaguely a GUI, but mostly a menu-based character user interface that ran on a bitmapped display.
I used a system with with the UCSD p-system. The original IBM PCs shipped with a choice of operating system. There was IBM PC-DOS or you have the p-system.
It was a joy to use – text menu system. Press a letter and the menu unfolded to show your choices. Much more visual than the MS-DOS (sorry, PC-DOS) command line that didn’t have command line recall. Suprisinlgy fast since it was all in semi-compiled Pascal.
I used a Terak computer running UCSD p-system in my second CS course at UCSB in 1979.
We also did assembly language programming on the same machines with had a 2 chip implementation of a scaled down (but near complete) pdp11 instruction set. The machine also had a great version of space invaders that we use to play all the time. More info on the Terak can be found here: https://www.threedee.com/jcm/terak/
More interestingly is that UCSD sued other UC campuses, including UCSB, for freely copying ‘their’ software and violating the licensing agreement. The case went to the state supreme court which ruled against UCSD because the are both the same school just different campus and that you can’t sue yourself.
Now I remember, the chip set in the Terak was the LSI-11 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSI-11#LSI-11 ) I even have the DEC assembly manual for it somewhere.
Didn’t the Amiga also precede the Mac?
Nope, sorry. The Amiga 1000 was launched in 1985, the year after the Mac.
Isn’t there some line about if Henry Ford had gone by what customers wanted he’d have built a better horse?
Anyway, I think it’s “If we build it right they might come.”
So, what’s the over/under on whether it’s IBM behind the attacks on the blog?
: – )
I’ll get to the bottom of this attack soon. What disturbs me is my hosting company wasn’t on top of it. I need better monitoring tools at the very least.
You might look into the WordPress.com VIP platform service that Andrew Sullivan uses for his Dish.
A couple of the WordPress sites I support have been under attack for the last week and a half. I’ve been playing whack-a-mole with IP ranges, futile really.
There was an emergency fix for WordPress earlier this week. you probably already got it, but if not, you should install it. think it’s 3.9.2
I think Ford said “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me faster horses.”
And thats what he gave them.
How abou a new Internet ? A hacker proof cloud based network? Call it the cybernet?
You can make a more general observation, which goes back even further: Necessity is *not* the mother of invention.
At-least, that’s the case that Henry Petroski makes in his book “The Evolution of Useful Things”. I’m only a few chapters into it so-far, but it’s good reading. The subject matter is a little dry for most peoples’ tastes, but he’s a good writer, and he brings the subject matter to life.
No, necessity is still the mother of invention. Invention and innovation are two entirely different things. One is technological, the other cultural.
Talking of invention, we owe inventions to unreasonable persons! The reasonable ones are content with the status-quo and then it all shifts.
Necessity still is the mother of invention. To Robert X’s point, it’s the *inventor’s* necessity that gives birth, not some focus group participant’s.
“Isn’t there some line about if Henry Ford had gone by what customers wanted he’d have built a better horse?”
I just have to say that Ford was about a century late to inventing the car… and was the third American automaker to use the assembly line. What customers wanted was a _cheaper_ car and, like Brush and others, he provided one. He was fortunate in his timing, the third time around (his first two ventures failed, and by the third time, Ransom Olds had proven the assembly line to be essential) and was rewarded for having an absolutely ruthless attitude towards those who worked for him, coupled with excellent marketing (the $5/day wage that almost no worker could get is just one example).
That said, the actual documented inventor of the car, a fellow named Cugnot, found no buyers — so timing is definitely part of the equation. So is marketing.
> the actual documented inventor of the car, a fellow named Cugnot
Hmm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas-Joseph_Cugnot , fascinating read, thank you.
Demand is alive and well, but it’s healthiest in China.
Supply-led business needs to create a market so it’s best-located close to the market.
And yet the Chinese market is as fad-driven as any other. Look at the iPhone’s success there. It’s very valid that the inventor should be close to his or her intended market — close as in having a deep understanding — but I’m not sure geography has to come into it.
I’d feel silly presuming to predict what’s next, but a word about the past. Henry Ford imagined that every working man’s family would own and drive an automobile and he set out to make that a reality. His peers though the idea was silly because no-one anticipated such a demand. Industrial workers were poor and did not go on vacation trips. And where were the roads going to come from? I do not suppose that things are all that different, just moving at an ever increasing pace.
I’m grateful that the current surge of innovation seems to derive from the excellent quality of science fiction writing since the ’50s. And Moores law — especially in China.
The roads came from wagon tracks. My uncles as boys would set the throttle, then jump out and run alongside the car, wheels locked into the ruts, on the prairies of the Dakotas.
In the early days, of course, there were no maps. Well, for that matter there were no gas stations or garages, either, but one of the problems with using an automobile was finding out how to get from one place to another, more interesting, place. Once cheap cars started to become available, there was a demand for these things, and not until then was there any market for them. Frankly, the thesis is too much like “Say’s Law,” which is often stated as, “Supply creates its own demand.” The way Say put it, as I understand it, was that since nobody produces anything except to get something else, when you produce something that allows you to exchange it for an equal value of other things. What he seems to overlook (I’m not sure: I’ve been trying to understand this tor a few years now) is that you might produce something that no one else wants, or it might have a value to other people that is much less than you expected. I believe Marx saw that flaw, but then I haven’t even gotten started on Marx yet.
Bob, you said, “The big question — make that the constant question — is what will customers want next?” but isn’t the real question “What will customers NEED next?”
BTW, we experienced the same thing. As the founder, I WANTED to be able to build web apps (and now mobile apps) with the skills I already had. I didn’t want to have to learn HTML or learn Objective-C and CocoaTouch. And I believed that if I wanted (or needed) this, then others would want/need it as well. So we added to Xojo the ability to create web applications using the same language, framework and IDE our users had been using to build desktop apps. None of them had been asking us to do this. I just believed it would be useful and it turns out, I was right. Now we are working on the same type of solution but for iOS and most likely later on, Android.
I think the trick is to recognize hidden pain. Customers can see the really obvious pain with the really obvious solution. But when the pain is not easy to recognize, it’s a harder problem to solve. I had no problem using a Palm Treo for example, but I knew my mother never could. Apple recognized that if they made it far easier for people to use a smartphone, a LOT more people would buy them. So the masses that bought smartphones didn’t realize them wanted one and those that already had them, didn’t see the point in Apple making a new one.
Find some pain that if it went away would suddenly make a product much more useful to a large group of customers and have the beginnings of a potential hit.
There’s more than just pain involved. There was no pain driving adoption of PCs, for example — just enthusiasm. This is not to say that your point about pain isn’t valid — just that it isn’t ALWAYS the driver. And I can even see it both ways. The iPod, for example, could be seen as relieving the pain of being unable to take all your music with you except I don’t think many users even realized they were experiencing such pain. Rather they experienced real excitement when they realized that was finally the case (having all your music with you all the time).
I had a Walkman in the 80s and portable CD players were a big thing in the 90s. Having to carefully select a tiny fraction of my music collection to carry with me at any time was a significant pain.
Wasn’t the adoption of the PC into large companies attributed to the pain of waiting for the DP department to get around to developing the program you needed? And of course if you consider boredom a type of pain….
Bob – there was actually a lot of pain that the PC relieved. In the 70’s we had to calculate spreadsheets by hand, at least two if not three times to make sure we didn’t make errors. To write a paper or letter one had to hand write it and then either type it oneself or if you were lucky enough give it to a typist who had an incredibly expensive IBM correcting typewriter or all manner of white-out to produce a final acceptable version. Then there were plastic “foils” for presentations. The book on IBM – Big Blues – talks about how their management even had overhead projectors built into their desks. Pain, yes indeed there was pain.
So in all, I agree with your thesis.
Way to get a plug for your product in there, Geoff!
To paraphrase Nietzsche, I guess this means “marketing is dead” ? I never like marketers anyway. 🙂
Marketing isn’t dead by any means, but it IS evolving. The point here I think is that commodities are demand-driven and products that aren’t commodities no longer are.
Ford is just introducing an F-150 pickup with an aluminum body. I doubt that any potential customers in Ford focus groups demanded aluminum bodies. They probably asked for better mileage. Adding that to Federal mileage mandates may have led to the aluminum body revelation at Ford. If it’s a big hit this will be an example of the supply effect.
Actually, aluminum vehicles including trucks have been a desire for some time. As you mention, driven by better MPG, but also lighter weight, stronger resistance to dents and won’t rust were the benefits many have known about. There have been aluminum hoods and other panels for some time but the cost was the problem to expand it to the whole vehicle. A full vehicle couldn’t be produced at an affordable price that met profit requirements. The cost didn’t justify the gas savings. You can see the same results in Hybrid electrics. The loss of range and vehicle cost doesn’t offset the potential savings in improved MPG.
This is where Alan Mulally had to have had a major influence on that decision to switch the F150 over. His experience with Aluminum at Boeing gave him a big advantage and my guess negotiated a deal with the Aluminum manufacturers.
What will be interesting is how far it goes. My guess is five years from now the new management will go back to steel to save money. Especially if fracking reduces the cost of oil. And the whole aluminum idea will be dead.
This is the whole problem with the better horse statement.
People wanted a better form of transport, it just happed that their current frame of reference was the horse drawn carriage.
I can wait to see some redneck try to smash his Aluminum Ford F-150 on his head.
Peh. This has existed since the beginning of humanity. Before paper people wanted cheaper or smoother leather/vellum/parchment.
As many companies say, “We provide solutions, not products”.
Where is someone who doesn’t care for overweening, vouchsafing, opaque, broken-by-design “solutions” supposed to go these days? Someone who wants transparent, honest tools, not opaque devices programmed for maximum mendacity and manipulation? Someone who doesn’t care one whit for a narcissistic, effete, disembodied-head lifestyle that elevates rentiers well beyond their value as field help, but cares very much about myself and *all* others living well?
I suppose we can still hack devices, for as long as spudgers, screwdrivers and JTAG still work.
What is next, that was the actual question, right?
It seems like there are no great new innovations in mobile. Wearables are only for the extra geeky. The phone wars have reached “good enough” and there are products even for small niches like phablets, Amazon’s entertainment phone, and the good camera phone.
Moores law is slowing. This is my industry and I see it happening. It just costs too much for too little on the next nodes. See https://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20140805-mooreslaw/ for a pragmatic discussion.
So, to innovate and improve a device, the sloppy silicon architectures will get fixed. The reliance on a Moores Law doubling made many sins easy to ignore. Small companies with an efficiency twist on chip design will get snapped up for big bucks by the big and medium sized traditional Silicon companies. The ones the valley was named after.
Desk top software will magically integrate with the internet. It won’t be programs and a browser for the web. Your PC will look more like the phone with Apps that share data everywhere. Evernote is the early prototype, but it will become seamless and expected.
IoT, every one talks about it, nobody knows what it is. The idea is only being chased because Google bought Nest. Lots and lots of money will be burned in that fire, and people will still say meh.
Wearables are only for the geeky
I remember hearing that tablets are only for the geeky not too long ago…
I hate to say it but this is mostly about a grasp of the obvious. No one knows they want some product until someone invents and provides it at a win-win price, a la the Ford comments. No one knows they want an iPod until you show it to them. It seems to me this is why business start ups fail at such alarming rates– they have the misfortune to provide products or services that people *don’t* want at prices they won’t pay in places they don’t want the product, in some lethal mix…
I have to admit the I disagree with you while heartily.
I normally disagree with you a little, but not enough that we can’t be friends.
Even if it’s only one person who demands something, it’s still demand driven. Even if the person demanding something is the person who build it.
Yes people sometimes build something because the can, but it’s normal because it’s something they want.
Also this is nothing new. The person who built the first car, probably didn’t think everyone in the works would want one. He probably didn’t see a huge use going forward. He just wanted a car, so built one.
Me thinks you are mistaken, sir. “Demand-driven” by definition has to involve a segment of the population, not a single person. So Bob is right that if one person needs something and then invents/creates it, this is not a demand-driven product.
I think the word “demand” is being misused here. Before Edison devised the tungsten filament light bulb people wanted better lighting, preferably at a cheaper price. Candles were expensive. Whale oil was a little less expensive for a while, but as demand grew the price went up. That led to the development of kerosene. Then somebody had the idea of using coal gas, but that required a huge investment in infrastructure. Edison’s invention allowed a cheaper infrastructure, which could also be installed more quickly. My point is the demand for electric lighting wasn’t actually a demand for electric lighting, it was a demand for better lighting. I’m trying to make the point that the demand or need may not be for a particular solution.
I must agree with you Jamie.
What I think Bob is describing here is called “latent demand”.
Its a fundamental mistake.
Ours is a free market economy: market = demand.
If they say there is no market for buggy whips, it’s because there is no demand.
Demand = consumption. True to form, consumption = 60-70% of all economic activity,… because ours is a market based system.
The demand for the Iphone has ALWAYS existed, but it was latent. That’s the great thing about innovation.
If supply could create demand, we wouldn’t be in a recession now.
I would call latent demand the demand people have for a product they *know* is coming. Like the internet nerds with an icon of a fistful of dollars waiting for an iPhone 6.
But the supply of the original iPhone created the demand.
What Mr Cringley is talking about is known as Say’s Law, which is the way economists thought about supply and demand before Lord Keynes turned up and provided the wet dream tool politicians have used ever s to hand out wads of free stuff to temporarily boost GDP during economic downturns. The problem is that they can’t seem to get to the flip side of Keynes theory, which would require them to turn off the spigot eventually. So temporary becomes permanent, but in the long run we are all dead and the debt is future taxpayers’ problem.
Needless to say, the GFC experience of a limp recovery well below economists’ projections seems to have created a bit, and I mean only a bit, of a revival of interest in Mr Say.
Entropy – I disagree. Before the original iphone (in fact before any “smart” phones) i really wanted an all in one touch screen phone/media player, i’m sure i wasn’t the only one.
Just because the iphone popularised the smart phone market, doesn’t mean there was no demand before that.
Even if people do not knwo exactly what they want, they still want something.
I am pretty sure there weren’t 200 million people out there like you back in 2006 who were hankering for a capacitive touch screen hand computer that had full access to the internet, an extremely good media player and also happened to make phone calls. 199.9 million of them probably had never conceived of the possibility. They were probably demanding the latest motorola flip phone, an iPod or had an entirely different preference set, maybe even unrelated to electronics (if that is possible:) ). On top of that 200 million there are all the android people too.
But once they saw the iphone, they wanted it.
I would say the iphone is a great example of Say’s Law.
The basic building blocks were already there. What the iPhone did, that had not been done before, was put them together in a great way. That had as much to do with Steve Jobs’s ruthless negotiation as with the technology.
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I had an iPaq H3650 from 2002. It had WiFi, in a PCMCIA expansion jacket. It had a large screen. It had a barely tolerable web browser. It had some apps that I have never seen paralleled in a modern device. But it was no phone, and its operating system sucked.
I had a Treo 650, from 2004. WiFi was available. Cellular Internet was available. It could play audio files. But the carriers wanted to nickel and dime you for every megabyte, and the Treo had no WiFi, so I never used its web and email functions, and it had nowhere near enough storage to be a practical media device.
The Qtopia Greenphone from Trolltech came out in 2006. A modern operating system with a modern UI (for the time) on a phone was not a foreign concept. But it was not intended for the mass market, and I never saw one.
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The iPhone was not crippled (by the carrier, anyway). It had WiFi. It had a data plan that was not billed by the megabyte. It had enough storage to replace the iPod. It had a world-class web browser. It had a modern operating system. And, most amazing to me at the time, it had visual voicemail. The business arrangement to do that, to convert voicemails into messages sent through cellular data without billing for it, I didn’t think any carrier would agree to that. “Press 7 to delete,” forever.
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So, the desire for something like the iPhone was there. Everybody in technology could see it was technically possible. They just didn’t think it was business-possible. There was a lot of unmet demand. And by the time it came out, lots of people already had similar-enough devices that they could conceptualize having an iPhone in their lives. There’s a reason Jobs introduced it as an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. Otherwise, it would have sold in very small quantities.
It is still not clear that we need spreadsheets, though without them MBAs might go wacko and be “committed”—Then there would be fewer of them actively meddling 🙂
alternately, they might become more useful (yes, I am prejudiced :), and substitute vision
hmmm, my English isn’t very good either
Makes you look around and think “Who’s going to be the next “GoPro” doesn’t it?
I agree that “supply” of a novel product will drive demand, but this is nothing new. Antiperspirant was a new product, and Madison Avenue created the demand by shaming people into using antiperspirants and deodorants. Same goes for whatever Aflac is claiming to sell (it ain’t insurance). I’m sure the guys who invented fire and the wheel had to do a bit of marketing to have their inventions accepted as well. 🙂
Yes, but… I was at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977 and saw lines around the block with essentially no marketing. I’ve seen pictures of MiTS customers camping in the Albuquerque parking lot in 1976 waiting for their Altair 8800s to be built — again essentially without marketing. There’s a point when a market is ready to pop yet nobody knows it, even startup founders and inventors. Look at the production estimates Ed Roberts gave his bank to finance Altair production — off by more than 1000 percent. IBM hoped it would sell 250,000 PCs.
The UCSD p-System was not a graphical computer system. Indeed, it was driven entirely by single-character menus. In that respect, it was more like the Lotus 1-2-3 command system.
You can see screen shots here:
https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/z80pack/screenshots/ucsd.html
Very reminiscent of Lotus.
I am surprised Lotus didn’t sue them for copyright infringement of the 1-2-3 user interface.
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We complain about Microsoft’s monopolistic behavior. We forget a lot of the fault actually goes to Microsoft’s competitors. In many ways they did more damage to themselves and to each other than Microsoft ever did.
Is it not what progress people are trying to make thus marking the forces of progress? The two forces to promote a new choice; Push of the Situation (F1) and Pull of the Solution (F2)
And the Two forces to block change; The Anxiety of the New Solution (F3) and The Habit of the Present (F4).
So to make progress the following formula must apply F1 + F2 > F3 + F4.
Website under attack? You need CloudFlare. CloudFlare = security as a service = a true Godsend.
customers have never known what they want, because if they knew what they wanted then they would make it happen. That’s what founders at their heart are, someone who wanted something enough to provide it. Go look at etsy and all the things that people wanted and made and are now selling.
customers do eventually decide what they want, with their dollars & clicks. Tracking that data, analyzing it, and reacting to it is the new demand driven economy. EG A/B testing. It turns out customers subconscious is exposed through tracking data, and their subconscious is the smarter customer any ways. It’s when you ask them to think about it that they start asking for things they’ll never want to buy at the price it would take.
Supply does not drive demand.
It can never do that.
What Bob is really talking about here is latent demand.
The demand was there, it was just latent. (hidden).
Which does not become unhidden until the supply arrives.
Customers will want experiences. Real experiences.
All these devices are getting old. Yesterday’s news. Social is crap. Who cares how many followers you have. Look up from your device and enter the real world. The devices need to disappear – or become integrated into everything so we no longer see them, but get the data and advantages of the devices.
Here is my dream. A wearable device integrated with gym and sports equipment that makes working out into a real-life video game. I am the player. Think Sports Bar activities or Chuck E Cheese for adults where I can compete with my own stats and other gym members doing fun athletic stuff. No weight lifting and spinning. Real activities like shooting hoops and running sprints on a track – all with live data on the big screen.
Or next up, a virtualized experience of playing in Van Halen. I’ve got my huge TV, killer sound system, and lost dreams of being a rock star. Why can’t I plug in my guitar, and some kind of Kinect thingy to put me on stage, and get an almost real experience of being on stage? Come on, I want near real. None of this Guitar Hero kid stuff.
“Near-real” should be the new term, not virtual reality or augmented reality. The next thing in tech should let me do things in reality that I could not otherwise do.
Re: “fun athletic” Oxymoron, to many of us.
The Wii Fit has made remarkable progress into blurring the lines between physical exercise and computer games.
Two articles that came to mind were
1) Doctors seeing a lot of ‘Wii Elbow’ as people play Wii Tennis too energetically
2) Wii Fit providing to old people in care as way of keeping them physically active.
I guess that your question is what comes next that will be widely adopted by consumers, that we don’t know we already want.
See the first item in this list – loss of the electrical grid: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-05/five-threats-more-terrifying-than-ebola-arriving-in-the-u-s-.html. We’ll want some old technology like axes and saws for firewood :). But it is interesting to think about how you would cope if your community lost all electrical power for a few weeks. Ok, so what I’ll really want is a hand powered charger for my Ipad so I can amuse myself with the not-so-latest games while I wait for the TV to come back on.
I see a lot of promise for medical diagnostic hardware that links to your phone app and the web, but adoption will be by groups or organizations rather than individuals, cause who needs to check their blood count daily? Still, these devices will provide a real benefit to the medically under served of the world. Is that demand driven, yeah, I guess, because some people are aware of the possibilities.
So, I’m thinking that most really new things are not developed in response to widespread demand, but production in quantity is necessarily driven by demand. It’s a nice subject to think about, so thanks for the post.
What is needed is an educational philosophy and product that empowers people so they can provide for themselves and other people, instead of needing a job that may not be enlightening or even available.
The internet of things is going to bring a world of pain. Already, autos, babycams, and lightbulbs are being hacked. Find a way to combine security with ease-of-use. Can’t be done, right?
Timing is hugely important. I know a serial entrepreneur who launched several companies, but the market wasn’t ready for his ideas, at that time (later they were, years after that venture folded).
When I was in school in the 1980s I remember a retired Japanese couple opened a sushi restaurant near the campus. No on ate the sushi and they started offering fish and chips just to stay in business. Eventually they folded and went bankrupt 🙁
But sushi is hot now . . . they were just too early.
Not sure of the dates of the Xerox Star you mentioned, but I remember back at Carnegie-Mellon University (Pittsburgh PA) back around 1980, from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Comp Sci department got access to a number of Xerox Alto computer systems. As I recall, they had screens that were Portrait mode, and showed black chars on a white background (most available screens at the time were Landscape, and white or green chars on a black background), They had a mouse, and each had a removable hard disk pack, one of which was assigned to each of many students (about 20 inches square, 2 inches thick). I seem to recall that one of the popular apps was an early multiplayer game where the characters were eyeballs that would move thru a maze and shoot things at each other. Very early Ethernet (via coax cable).
No question about it, in 2014 the thing we need most is Flying Cars!
Bob, thanks again for your always great articles!
Ciao,
Bob (the other one)
The next big thing is Home Automation run by a device that pulls together TV, Music, Gaming, like storage with cloud backup as well as all the devices needed to automate the smart running of one’s home. We are talking about ‘Nest’-style devices, door locks, lighting and heating devices to manage energy consumption, etc.
There is so much one could do with home automation and the integration of one’s entertainment. But there is a problem:
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In the entertainment industry the content owners and providers are working hard to keep their stuff proprietary. My cable TV service just went 100% digital. Guess how many digital ATSC channels I get? ZERO. Why do they even put ATSC tuners in TV’s? No one uses them? Why don’t the satellite and cable folks use ATSC? If they did we wouldn’t need to rent tuners from them. DVR? Nope, you can’t buy one.
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The other problem is the Internet of Things. While this sounds very good and exciting. It scares the crap out of me. Lets be honest here. The Internet has become a very dangerous place. This weeks column starts off with Bob telling us his website had been compromised. We have a massive spam problem. We have cyber crime. We have identity theft (Russian hackers have 1.2 billion user ideas and passwords!). We have lots of cyber crap prodding and poking at every IP address on the Web. Do we really want to expose our homes to this? Do you want criminal to be able to open your garage door with their smartphone?
The Internet of Things is a compelling idea. Even now, I’m plotting to replace my workplace’s stupid built-in-2012-what’s-wrong-with-the-21st-Century thermostats with something smarter. But I’m too paranoid to trust it all to Google Nest, and most other companies have no idea how to do secure protocols. Belkin already got in trouble for this, with their WeMo. Also, the HVAC system is poorly designed and complicated to control. I’m going to have to build my own thermostats.
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I think the biggest problem for the Home Automation / Internet of Things is coordination. As of now, the Nest does not talk with the Hue Lights, and the high-efficiency dishwasher does not talk with the tankless water heater. A web browser on my refrigerator would be much more useful if it could relay notifications from my laundry machines. (Laundry machines that unload themselves and put my laundry away are pretty far-fetched. Laundry machines that communicate when they’re done are firmly in the realm of the possible.) The problem is that the easiest way to control this chaos is to centralize.
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My own plottings to replace the thermostats are based on using a small server to collect data and control the system. Or at least using one smart thermostat as a queen bee to rule the rest, so the poorly designed HVAC system doesn’t fight itself. Most people are not going to run small servers, and a server is just another target for attackers, with all the security updates that this implies. Except for the overreaching legal system, I think most people would be better off with Google holding their data for them. But then Apple wants to be in control, instead. And Belkin has joined IFTTT.
I’m starting to wonder what a decentralized system would look like, maybe a system of propagated events and translator hubs; but HVAC systems need more historical data than a light system does to work efficiently, and there’s still security.
How about a next gen internet internet ,with high levels of security built in ,
to stop spam, all websites use hpps, or some form encyption, all email ,sms, is encypted by default ,
all servers certificates are issued by 10 companys ,
independent of government control,
only uses ip6.
Things like routers etc would use more secure protocols to make hacking, spoofing harder.
There would be just 10 top level domains on it,
like,gov, com, eg hppt. guv.net2,
to stop people making fake websites, or phishing.
IT would be designed that a french email company,
that has its servers ,in france ,can route all traffic ,thru european ,or french servers,
eg avoid uk,and usa servers ,to avoid surveillance .
ALL government and military websites would be on 1 or 2 domains,
with a higher level of security .
IF you want say a usa website ,could lock down its website,
in the event of ddos,
etc to only allow usa based servers to acess it.
EG does anyone in russia or japan ,really need to acess the usa healthcare website?
Security would be built in at all levels ,
unlike the present version of the web.
IT would be optimised for speed and for security .
OR a smartphone or tablet with long battery life,
20 pus hours and a bw mode, browser,
eg if i visit say cringely .com ,
Like ereaders have just plain black and white text.
or latimes.com , i just see black and white text ,
no pictures , no colour , to extend battery life.
i just want to read on a tablet ,
i don.t need a quad core cpu ,or a fast graphics card designed for gaming, on a tablet.
One of the future things that would succeed is a technology/service that would be hacker-proof, for personal devices particularly.
Bob, your friend should update his website. No need for anything too fancy. It just feels like I’ve gone back in time. Anyone not familiar with the company would wonder if they are even alive/relevant any more.
A stupid simple way for people to catalog and manage all their stuff, with an API that’d let you perhaps write in an eBay exporter, or a data dump for the insurance company, or a small-business inventory management system.
Are you serious? I’ve been thinking about this for ages, but think that getting people to do the initial data entry, even using QR scanners and camera, would be too time consuming.
What I need is a dislike button on faceboook!
BINGO!
(and I don’t even have a FB account). But wherever there’s a “like” button, there should also be a “dislike” button.
If you want an idea on the next big innovation, I think this could be a candidate: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-perovskite-solar-cells-cheaper-materials.html
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For 50 years engineers have dreamed of making electricity from sunlight. Yes solar cells have been around for long time but they have been expensive and inefficient. A true engineering innovation is one that is economically sound and sustainable. “Economic” is the key word here! Most of the “renewable” energy sources have been pushed by government. We all know how good government is in understanding and managing technology, and being financially responsible. They aren’t. If the technology is not ECONOMICALLY sustainable it will not last. Over the next 10 years a lot of solar cell and windmills will be disappearing from the landscape. It is not because they were a bad idea, it will be because they produce less value than it will cost to fix them.
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Perovskite could be the big break through in solar cell technology we’ve been looking for. Science is finding better ways to produce electricity from sunlight. This team understands the need to have a scale-able, cost efficient technology. If their work continues to bear fruit, this could be a game changer. I wish them success.
The universal answer is something sexy or addictive to take advantage of all the weaknesses already configured in our highly evolved brains. The newer answer would be something that appeals to lower middle classes who’s populations are increasing fast – China will soon have the highest GDP of any country.
Addictions work directly on the brain’s pleasure centre and bypass all the useful behaviours that were meant to be rewarded so we should ignore them leaving just genes and memes. The Apple iPhone is an overpriced phone but very cheap jewellery – all the girls I know got them as presents from someone else as a cheap way to show love. In Saint Louis, Missouri, girls typically meet each other by asking which school did you go to thereby establishing which district their parents lived in and so the minimum house plot size and so their relative wealth. Relative ranking is very important in some societies and especially between women when they are given a choice (not in those many countries with rapidly growing populations where women have less choice).
So the ideal female next invention would be wearable, attractive, around USD 1000 and help women communicate even more – got to be some kind of watch ?
The ideal male possession is a home but for a new invention that would impress women, assist transport to bars, shops, holiday home, and be around $30,000, that would have to be the wheeled production version of the Volocopter 🙂
Well if you’re seeking hindsight, then the technology boom started by government investment into the defense industry that broadened out to civilian applications lead to increasing miniaturization and innovation of information technology. More and more of life was reduced to information to become accessible by this technology including navigation, communication, news, entertainment, prophesy, you name it.
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We’re still seeking the limits of information. Information can give us insight, but not resolution or satisfaction. We are material beings and information is inherently immaterial. So the next big thing can’t be a bigger, badder algorithm. The next big thing has to be something we can touch and feel. 3-D printers feel like the right synthesis of our newly acquired information godhead and physical stuff we can fully experience.
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On a more practical level you can argue that all the tech innovators from Amazon to Yahoo all just used the building blocks that were already there. Whether it’s software or TTL logic, the building blocks were known to all and some folks are just going to be artists where others are numbskulls. For a real breakthrough we need new building blocks. For that molecular biology combined with information technology is a possibility where designer medicines, vitamins and nutrients tailored to YOU could make the best you that can be.
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Or maybe just an iPod with a 3D display.
I think we’re just starting to explore the possibilities of the Internet of Things. The missing piece seems to be a unified system of control. Also, security is bad.
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Thermostats are incredibly stupid. Water heaters are dumb, and tankless water heaters have several practical problems. One review mentioned how the high-efficiency dishwasher and the tankless water heater don’t communicate, so the tankless heater doesn’t know that the dishwasher wants hot water. Modern laundry machines now take less water and electricity, but they still don’t have any way to tell me that they’re finished except by yelling. My basement is too far away to hear them. The high-efficiency dryer also sucks at estimating when it will be done.
For more frivolous concerns, I still need to hunt down light switches and figure out which direction does what on 3-way switches, and I still need to have a metal ring filled with keys to control access to doors, in buildings built in the 21st Century. Where are the slidey doors that go “whoosh”? I don’t like keys, and I don’t like having to carry my keys when I go jogging.
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So, everybody wants to be in charge of your Internet of Things. Apple has HomeKit. Google has Thread Group. The latest TVs have all sorts of hidden functions uncoordinated with everything else, like the LG TVs sending private information back to headquarters. In the Maker community, there’s the Spark Core, putting all the power in Spark’s hands. Every Nest customer is nervous about how Nest data is now suddenly Google data. I don’t want to commit to any Internet of Things system until I can be sure that *my* stuff send *my* data to systems that *I* control. That’s a major unmet demand.
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Security is also a major bugbear. Regardless of whether you trust Apple or Google, or whether you’re stockpiling your data at home, at some point your device is going to come under attack. I think blaming IPv6 global addressing is a red herring. Even if your device is “secure” behind a router doing NAT, it will be vulnerable to malware running on your PC. Actually, more vulnerable, because Nmap scanning is much less practical in IPv6 than in IPv4. But devices will have to be built with the ability to do automatic and validated security updates, because updating just the PC is already too difficult for many people. And what if the power goes out? I can tolerate not doing laundry for a few hours, but I would want a manual override for my 2-factor-authenticated front door.
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Some commentators think the Internet of Things is just a fad from the technological elite. I think it has the potential to be much more. But it will be challenging to fulfill this potential, and the security problems will cause real-world problems.
What do I think is coming next?
Hopefully a telemarketer call blocker that actually works. In addition to blocking calls, if the call blocker automatically launched a drone strike, even better.
I’m using the free version of “Calls Blacklist” which works well, except for the fact that I must supply the data by adding numbers from my call log. It even works for land-line calls, assuming you forward them to your cell phone. What we need is a service, like this: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm only with phone numbers instead of websites.
What do you think is coming next?
Decentralized Autonomous Corporations. When people figure out that the CEO can be outsourced by a string of code then you will see a paradigm shift that will turn 1487 years of corporation history on it’s head.
So what happened in the year 527 A.D. that made it the beginning of corporate history?
Are you going to fill us in a bit more about the attack on your blog?
Bob, this is the pent-up need today: Products and services that are sold by plain-dealing, honest and transparent companies. Companies that do not make it their business to trick you, nickel and dime you, sell you short, add a host of below the line bogus fees, are dependent on their size and government protection and handouts to survive.
People just want to buy something without getting caught by a gotcha, fine print, drive-by download, having to to jump through hoops, mail in a rebate without a typo. Where a company asks to send legal documents to you by email, understands that it is fair that you can do the same with them.
Yes, I mean the ISPs, phone companies, airlines, banks, rentals of all types, car dealerships, healthcare providers, educational institutions, anyone related to the home ownership business, lawyers, and last but not least, the government.
If you can develop an app that can cut through the clutter, misdirection and bullshit, you will be the savior of us all.
I’m not sure how to express this thought, but ‘personal analytics’ seems like that nebulous something that _I_ want. I want control of the cloud of data that sourrounds me and makes me either valuable or not valuable to Google, Amex and all the rest. I want to know who gets data about my medical state as well as my financial status and purchasing habits. I want to know what’s out there and possibly limit it and/or react to it and have input to it.
Looks like those spam robots are smart enough to get around Bob’s spam bot test.
I know there are not a lot of economist who read this site but as much as I really enjoyed 90% of this Blog the Strawman Anti-premise (“Demand drove supply in the industrial age,” said Aurel. “You needed more steel to build cars so a new steel mill was built.) is completely wrong while the rest of the article is spot on and is in fact a proof of Say’s Law. In fact Supply has always driven demand, not just in the days of information technology but in the complete history of people trading in a marketplace. The original thoughts on are know as “Say’s Law or Formulation”, after the 18th century French Economist Jean-Baptiste Say although some historian also credit John Mill (the father of John Stuart Mill) as first coming up with the saying “Supply creates its own demand”. It doesn’t take much of a reading of economic history to find so many great examples of this. From the steam engine to the railroads to automobiles, etc. etc. Two of my favorite quotes on this follow below:
In 1820, David Ricardo, writing to Thomas Malthus, said:
“Men err in their production; there is no deficiency of demand.”
Henry Ford, in his autobiography My Life and Work (1922), implies Say’s Law when he says:
“When a great many people want to buy, there is said to be a shortage of goods. When nobody wants to buy, there is said to be an overproduction of goods. I know that we have always had a shortage of goods, but I do not believe we have ever had an overproduction. We may have, at a particular time, too much of the wrong kind of goods. That is not overproduction—that is merely headless production. We may also have great stocks of goods at too high prices. That is not overproduction—it is either bad manufacturing or bad financing.”[2] (emphasis added)
The above can be directly related to the rest of your blog which very rightly and well said by the way calls out the fact that innovative new products create their own demand. However so does the supply or commodities at a cheap enough price. For instance the best historical precedent for AWS style cloud computing are the innovations that led to Electric Utilities and the Power Grid, which in turn droped the price of electricity to such low levels that enable the electronic revolution to occur. etc. etc etc
Looking around
I like to look in various places on the internet, often I will go to Digg and read and check stuff out
What I want? Peace and quiet. I’ll probably get it sooner than I’d like.
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