Turning%20Technology%20into%20Fortune

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Turning Technology into Fortune

• Jyoti Tandukar

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The PC

• Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the founder of IBM,
  proclaimed that the world-wide demand for data
  processing computers would come to fewer than
  fifty machines.
• "We are already meeting our needs with large
  machine", the conventional thinking went, "so why
  would we need small ones?"

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• The answer, as we see now, was that the great
  power of PCs did not lie in doing what larger
  machines already did but in giving birth to
  entirely new classes of applications.

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Telephone and Radio

• A lack of deductive thinking about technology is
  not a new problem, nor one confined to laypeople.
  Early on, many people thought that the greatest
  potential for the telephone lay in reducing the
  loneliness of the farmer's wife.

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Telephone and Radio

• Thomas Edison once said he thought the value of
  the phonograph, which he invented, was its
  capability to allow "dying gentlemen" to record
  their last wishes.

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Telephone and Radio

• Marconi, the developer of the radio, viewed it as
  a wireless telegraph that would operate
  point-to-point he didn't recognize its potential
  as a broadcast medium.

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Photocopier

• The real power of xerography was completely
  missed by no less a company than IBM. In the late
  1950s, when Xerox was performing the basic
  research on the 914, its first commercial copying
  machine, the company was hard pressed for money
  and wanted to cash out of the project. It offered
  its patents to IBM.

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Photocopier

• IBM hired Arthur D Little (ADL) to do a market
  research study. ADL concluded that even if the
  revolutionary machine captured 100 percent of the
  market for carbon paper, dittograph, and
  hectograph the techniques used for copying
  documents at the time it still would not repay
  the investment required to get into the copier
  business.

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Photocopier

• We know now indeed, it seems obvious that the
  power of the Xerox copier did not lie in its
  capability to replace carbon paper and other
  existing copying technologies, but in its ability
  to perform services beyond the reach of these
  technologies.

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Photocopier

• The 914 created a market for convenience copies
  that had previously not existed. Thirty copies of
  an existing document to share with a group or
  coworkers was not a need people knew they had
  before the invention of xerography. Since people
  couldn't make thirty copies easily and
  inexpensively, no one articulated doing so as a
  "need".

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Walkman

• Realizing that people are unable to conceptualize
  what they do not know, Sony gave the Walkman the
  green light based on developers' insights into
  people's needs and the capabilities of
  technology. The Walkman transformed people's idea
  about where and how they could listen to music.

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The Internet

• Until few years back, Internet was taken as a
  means to exchange messages and share research
  information. Nobody at that time had thought that
  it would become a basic infrastructure just as
  electricity for doing business.

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Lesson to Learn

• Breakthrough technology makes feasible activities
  and actions of which people have not yet dreamed.
  The challenge that most corporations fail to meet
  is recognizing the business possibilities that
  lie latent in technology.