The Future Is Coming To Get You

There's a famous quote by Ken Olson, the founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, in response to his computer design staff pushing for research on small, home-based computers in 1977. Mr. Olson's reply to these ideas was that "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

We can give Mr. Olson something of a pass on this matter, since it's not like there was substantial high-tech history to draw on -- even though his own staff had put together a memo some eight years earlier describing the potential uses of a small computer, such as shopping from home, playing complex games, and doing your taxes. But what's really criminal is when companies do have history to draw on, and they still fail to notice it.

I speak, of course, of my favorite punching bag, the collective of mobile device manufacturers staggering around from one trend to another like drunkards desperately trying to figure out which direction home is in. It's time that certain companies woke up and discovered a fundamental truth about doing business with techology. The future isn't waiting around for you to be ready for it. The future is coming to get you. History is rife with examples of companies and entire industries that have been ground up into hamburger practically overnight because they failed to detect the next big thing bearing down on them.

So it shouldn't surprise anyone when companies that fall behind get trampled. It's more astonishing, to my mind, that so many companies manage to remain in business despite failures of insight and shoddy practices. Witness Palm, Inc., which spent some years doing everything within its power to commit collective suicide. It did manage to drive its marketshare from 90% down to about 20%, but even so, it's still out there, and quite strong -- albeit thanks solely and completely to their being handed the Treo line in their merger with Handspring.

In all honesty, I don't mean to pick on Palm particularly -- it's not like most of the other players have ever really figured out the marketing for a high-end mobile device either. But Palm's by far the easiest target, having the longest series of pratfalls and self-immolations along the way of any company that's still sucking down oxygen. It would really kill you guys to advance the ball a little bit without being pushed?

One of the things that I keep hearing is that the hardware doesn't matter. Most people don't care whether their device has 3G or not, or a fast processor, or any other thing. And moreover that it's unprofitable and undesirable to cater to "power users," because we're a niche market. Bollocks. Oh, surely it's true that some people don't care about what they own. But the secret is that the people buying those free camera phones from Radio Shack are never going to buy your product, no matter how dumbed down you make it. If the iPhone proves anything, it's that you can make high-tech sexy and desirable to both a high-end and low-end crowd.

Manufacturers today are like the French radical who watched a crowd of people running by, and said "There go my people; I must find out where they're going, so that I can lead them." You don't get to be a groundbreaker, an innovator, a market leader, by holding up a moistened finger to see which way the wind is blowing. You do it by producing a compelling product, and by showing people why it's compelling. These manufacturers, like lemmings, each assume that the others know where they're going, and they're each of them wrong.

If companies only ever built and sold what was selling well at that moment, Ford would have shut down after a few thousand Model Ts, and the PC would be a footnote in history. Practically the most important aspect of business is not just providing what customers want right now, but knowing that they're going to want next, and being ready to give it to them.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who fail to adapt based on those lessons are just doomed.