**“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” –Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
**“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” -- Ken Olsen, CEO and Founder, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
**"640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates in 1981
**“The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, 1843.
**(About the idea of a steamship) "What Sir? Would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck?...I have no time to listen to such nonsense." -- Napoleon Bonaparte statement in 1805 to Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat
**"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." — Albert Einstein
**"The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost." — Steve Jobs, 1996.
** "Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years."— Alex Lewyt inventor and manufacturer of vacuum cleaners, 1955.
**"My invention, [the motion picture camera], can be exploited...as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever." — Auguste Lumière co-developed the cinema camera in 1895.
**"Man will not fly for fifty years." — Wilbur Wright, 1901, before first motor-powered flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903.
**"Video [TV] won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." — Darryl F. Zanuck, motion-picture producer, 1946.
With benefit of hindsight, these assertions[1] remind us of the precariousness of predictions about technology. As Yogi Berra apparently said, "It´s tough to make predictions, especially about the future."[2] The pace of technological advancement is accelerating. We have yet to hit the limits on Moore’s Law or other predicted rates of technological advance. Keeping up with all this change is a growing issue. Darden spends millions of dollars each year on information technology. As Dean, I have frequently wished for a moratorium on technological change at least so that we all can catch up to last year’s innovations. Alas, such is not to be. Thus, this summer I embarked on a process of readings and visits to information technology (IT) experts and leading companies in an effort to understand the major trends in IT and what might be their implications for a graduate business school. I want to share some first impressions with you and invite you to swap your impressions with me.
I’ll warn you that there is a breathless optimism in much of what is written and said about advances in information technology. (Information technology is fast becoming a term to talk about enterprise level software investment usually around productivity improvement.) I’m not quite so smitten with all of this: awed skepticism is more like what I sense. You come away convinced that something very big is happening, but not quite sure whether it is good. Can ethicists keep up with this?[3] I see five developments that are likely to change higher education and business practice in fundamental ways—these are “disruptive innovations,” to use the phrase of Clayton Christensen. I am cautiously optimistic that if managers, students, and educators are very clever, these changes can be harnessed to enhance learning and business practice.
- Ubiquitous mobile connectivity and computing. This is visible around us. Everyone has a cell phone; some carry several. Many carry personal digital assistants (like a Blackberry). Some of these devices permit the use of rather advanced application software and multiple channels of communication (such as email, voice, and text messaging). If you think email is the state of the communications art, think again—the rising generation (“Gen-Y,” “NextGen,” or the “Millennial Generation”) scorns email in favor of instant messaging and text messaging. In one of my postings about my trip to India last fall, I mentioned the widespread evidence of cell phones and iPods even among the most humble people in Indian society. Many Darden students have no landline telephones: you reach them wherever their cellphones happen to be—and/or their laptop computers. The spread of mobile broadband access and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephony means that students are not identified by a physical address. The key ideas are ubiquity and mobility of communications and computing. Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, California, that “There is no there there.” Well, with ubiquity and mobility, she is right—the only relevant place is here, wherever you happen to be. There is no escaping the world: you can always be reached where you are. Will it be truly possible to create spaces for focused engagement, free of distracting intrusions? And if the here of learning diffuses out to wherever the students are, how will universities maintain their role in creating and leading the educational agenda in society? In my view, embracing ubiquity and mobility is challenge #1 for educators.
- Growing interactivity. Challenge #2 for educators and business leaders is to harness in useful ways the online communities or social networks that are forming via the Internet. If you haven’t engaged with social networking, try it: Plaxo, flickr, MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, and takingITglobal. These and other sites are creating spontaneous new communities around common interests. Michael Steep (D’80, now at Microsoft) predicts that social networking will have a bigger impact on society than the introduction of the personal computer. Steep wrote, “What evidence do I have to support my contention? Let me offer just two examples. First, the entire business model of a Google is built upon a social networking architecture and virtually all new developers for mobile phones are doing the same thing. Second, the mobile platform is already surpassing PCs in unit volume and sheer pervasiveness. Your earlier example of India demonstrates that the mobile platform is more valuable than the land line and is used as a low-cost PC substitute.” Web 1.0 entailed the first steps of a commercialized internet, with limited interactivity. Web 2.0 saw the growth of user-generated content, the dawning of deeper interactivity, and the founding of social networks and open-source applications of many kinds.
- Spreading norms of open source collaboration. Challenge #3 for leaders and educators resides in managing changes in norms around ownership of ideas, originality of contribution, and team-based work. The constellation of open-source software consortiums, wikis, blogs, software mashups, chat rooms, social networking, peer-to-peer downloading, personal broadcasting, and the like create a community of extraordinary breadth with very different norms than most corporations are apt to adopt. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams suggest that these norms include openness (being flexible about networking, sharing, and self-organizing); peering (the reliance on peers to perfect new products and services, as exemplified in the founding of the Linux operating system); sharing (managing intellectual property with a view toward accelerating innovation, often by sharing, rather than withholding, the IP); and acting globally (ignoring national boundaries in searching for the best ideas, talent, and connectivity). As Tapscott and Williams wrote, “the losers launched Web sites. The winners launched vibrant communities. The losers built walled gardens. The winners built public squares. The losers innovated internally. The winners innovated with their users. The losers jealously guarded their data and software interfaces. The winners shared them with everyone.”[4] There is more information in the extended community than in any one individual. The open source movement harnesses the wisdom in the community. But is “online collectivism” healthy? In a world of collective communities, the process for inventing new products and services will likely change. Eric Raymond, for instance, characterized software development as shifting from an orderly process—like building a cathedral—to a rather disorderly process, such as doing business in a bazaar. As unlikely as the bazaar metaphor seems for inventing new goods and services, in fact it describes well the process of developing the very successful Linux operating system. Mozilla, Apache, and Wikipedia have grown in a similar way. The computer scientist, Jason Lanier, has worried that collectivism could repress authentic individual voices. Bill Gates has suggested that collectivism will destroy incentives for inventors. Anyway, what is the proper boundary of a firm (with respect to customers, suppliers, competitors, others)? How permeable should the boundary be? How global should the firm be? And is “open source” product ever really “free” or at least inexpensive?
- Increasing complexity of software service. Software is (was), by and large, rather dumb: you give it orders, and it responds. But imagine new applications that provide richer services that anticipate the user’s interests. Just over the horizon (actually here today in applications on the mobile platform) is what experts call “Web 3.0”—this will blend higher interactivity with the widespread mobile broadband access to support the delivery of on-demand software services. This is the so-called “semantic web,” which seeks to give computers the ability to understand content on the Web. It will facilitate the search and sharing of data, the advanced analysis of data (“data mining” tied to opt-in profiling) that can provide extremely detailed information to marketers, the harnessing of individual personal computers into large “clouds” of analytic power, and the operation of very rich social simulations, as we now see in Second Life. This will elevate the value of insights from sociology, anthropology, psychology, and economics in the crafting of services, products, and messages. Challenge #4 for leaders and educators will be to become smarter and more demanding users of the software-as-a-service.
- Unlimited and unfiltered access to products: “hits” versus the long tail. In most industries you hear some variation on Pareto’s Law, that a small percentage of the products or services account for the vast majority of the revenues or profits—think of blockbuster movies or popular music. In any retail establishment, the shelves are full of “hits.” But in a world of unlimited and unfiltered access to products through the Internet, the economics of the long tail” (the products and services that aren’t hits) become more attractive. There is money in the highly segmented long tail of the market and it is harvested through aggregation (think Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, and eBay). How must organizations employ aggregation to serve the long tail? How can you best reach the niche demand? How do you set prices or expectations for service and product quality down in the tail? Is there such a thing as too much choice or variety? Chris Anderson’s book is a manifesto for serving the long tail. But a recent article by Anita Elberse explores this assertion: as demand shifts from off-line retailers to online retailers, will the “tail” of sales distribution become longer and fatter? She finds that sales are indeed shifting toward the tail. But she notes that “long tail” products are still appreciated less than the “hits,” and that in the aggregate, the most money remains in “hits” of various kinds, rather than in the long tail. Challenge #5 for leaders and educators is to harvest the benefits from easier access to the long tail. Products and ideas can move more easily toward a broader audience. This is a challenge of harnessing enhancements in distribution.
- Daily me. The cultural analogue to the long tail is the narrow pursuit of one’s taste. Social critics such as Nicholas Negroponte and Cass Sunstein, have argued that one can forgo the broad-band collection of news in a newspaper for the narrow-band collection of only the information you want to hear—Negroponte calls this the “Daily Me.” Christine Rosen says that customized news feeds, RSS feeds from blogs that you like, TiVo, and iPods allow us to construct a cultural narrative—“In our haste to find the quickest, most convenient, and most easily individualized way of getting what we want, are we creating eclectic personal theaters or sophisticated echo chambers? Are we promoting a creative individualism or a narrow individualism? An expansion of choices or a deadening of taste?”[5] Sunstein worries that increasing focus will lead to increasing polarization of society. One of my colleagues gets no daily newspaper, preferring instead to download the news through the Blackberry and computer. I cling to hard copy of several daily and weekly publications. Who is the better informed? If being informed matters for the quality of decision-making, then challenge #6 for leaders and educators is to promote broadly-informed communities.
Where things really start to get complicated is in the possible interactions of these six trends. For instance, Michael Steep wrote to me recently that, “In the old model, IT exerts control over deployment and how people use the applications. Social networking and mobile technologies will change this dramatically since the technology itself offers users the opportunity to configure their own networks and download applications readily available from the net ( IT department loses control). As the mobile platform becomes more pervasive in the US, it will present an incredible challenge for IT to control anything.”
By now, you can sense where my assessment of these trends is taking me. I’m reflecting on the role of a university in a society with all of these changes in progress. In this future, what does it mean to be “well-educated”? What is the place for professors, librarians, and editors? What is the significance of professional credentials in a society of easy access, rapid exchange of ideas, and the collective? Who gets credit for scholarly inquiry? How is the credit granted? What does “copyright” mean? Will the university be a place to which people come, or simply a nexus for electronic distribution of materials? MIT allows universal access to professors’ lectures. The California Open Source Textbook Project is building a world history textbook using the software that runs Wikipedia. The role of a university is to discover and disseminate new knowledge, and to help develop the mind and its thinking processes to sort through decisions in a constructive way. Michael Steep wrote to me that, “The central problem corporations experience is that people don’t seem to know how to think or communicate their thought process. How does the university address this problem in an age of complete information overload and super short periods in decision-making? The technology is creating change more rapidly than mere human beings are able to adjust to and so it is also true in the business world. Our product life cycles have cratered to timeframes so short that people are having difficulty managing the cycle.” How to do this in the context of growing “cocooning”? Does society need physical public spaces for good discourse to occur? Is anything on wikis, blogs, or social networks, “authoritative” and therefore trustworthy?
In a recent article, Nicholas Carr asked, “Is Google making us stoopid?” He pointed to the ease with which Google and other search engines help us find information on the Internet and speculated that it would produce intellectual laxity. Hey, if it is easier, why complain, right? But I am reminded of the poet, William Butler Yeats, who asked, “How can you know the dancer from the dance?” Isn’t the process fundamentally entwined with the outcome? Isn’t one’s intimate engagement with the process of discovery actually a part of the discoveries one makes? Nicholas Carr didn’t answer his own question; he fretted. I think educators will need to embrace automated search and related software in ways to promote depth of intellectual outcomes.
Chris Anderson is more sanguine than Nicholas Carr. Anderson argues that “it’s up to you to consult enough sources so that you can make up your own mind. This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require—and reward—investigation. The sixties told us to question authority, but they didn’t provide us with the tools to do so. Now we have those tools. The question today is how best to use them without becoming overwhelmed by uncertainty. Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions. If professional affiliation is no longer a proxy for authority, we need to develop our own gauges of quality.”[6] Anderson argues that the secret for success of an enterprise is in two rules: make everything available; help me find it.
Clayton Christensen has studied the impact of disruptive innovations on industries and recently wrote, “New players disrupting an established industry never succeed by replicating the incumbents’ cost structure. Instead, they commoditize the part of the product or service that had been valued in the past and shift the value to another stage. In the case of business education, historically the professor has been the key to the teaching quality; going forward, to survive the disruption, business schools must commoditize the professor….Whoever figures out how to do this best will remain relevant in management education. Business schools that disdain this opportunity do so at their own peril. More people are taking advantage of business education in alternative ways and fewer are seeing the value of the MBA; these trends are unlikely to reverse. While emerging business education programs do not appear to be threats at the moment, they cannot be ignored. Many successful companies in other industries have closed their eyes to seemingly harmless companies only to wake up one day to see the disruptive threat fully materialized—and the game largely over.”[7]
Sometime around year 2000, I had a brief conversation with an eminent historian over cocktails one evening. In the course of making small talk, I asked him if he had gone online. He swelled up and grew red in the face and said, “I haven’t learned a thing from the Internet. Why should I go there?” Eight years later, I wonder if he is saying the same thing. I venture to guess that his younger colleagues take a rather different view. If we don’t pay attention today, where will our grasp be in eight years from now?
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Here’s my list of recommended reading….
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the future of Business Is Selling Less of More, New York: Hyperion, 2006.
Borland, John, “A Smarter Web: new technologies will make online search more intelligent—and may even lead to a ‘Web 3.0’” Technology Review March 2007.
Nicholas Carr, “Is Google making us stoopid?” The Atlantic July/August 2008.
Anita Elberse, “Should you invest in the ‘long tail’?” Harvard Business Review, July/August 2008, 88-
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, New York: Knopf, 1995.
Eric Raymond, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, New York: O’Reilly Media, 2001.
Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics, New York: Portfolio, 2006.
[1] Thanks to resources on the Internet, such as Don’t Quote Me, it is easy to compile lists of quotations such as this.
[2] Checking the origin of the Yogi Berra quote, I found an exchange at the Economist web site that attributes the saying originally to Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist-philosopher Niels Bohr and/or to the Danish poet Piet Hein.
[3] Michael Steep writes, “There is clearly an opportunity to discuss ethical and moral challenges presented by the new technology architectures including issues about tracking what people do in a social network and then selling the profile information to all bidders.”
[4] Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics, page 39.
[5] Christine Rosen, from an essay in The New Atlantis, quoted in Anderson’s The Long Tail, page 189.
[6] Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, pages 190-191.
[7] Clayton Christensen, “On Innovation,” BizEd, May/June 2008 page 34.