What Is the Relevance of Technologies?

“Technologies in the extended-run is irrelevant”. That is what a consumer of mine told me when I made a presentation to him about a new solution. I had been talking about the product’s characteristics and rewards and listed “state-of-the-art technology” or one thing to that effect, as one of them. That is when he made his statement. I realized later that he was correct, at least within the context of how I applied “Technology” in my presentation. But I began thinking about regardless of whether he could be proper in other contexts as well.

What is Technology?

Merriam-Webster defines it as:

1

a: the sensible application of understanding particularly in a certain area: engineering two

b: a capability offered by the practical application of knowledge
Each definitions revolve about the same point – application and usage.

Technologies is an enabler

Lots of men and women mistakenly believe it is technology which drives innovation. However from the definitions above, that is clearly not the case. It is chance which defines innovation and technologies which enables innovation. Feel of the classic “Make a better mousetrap” instance taught in most business enterprise schools. You could have the technology to build a greater mousetrap, but if you have no mice or the old mousetrap performs properly, there is no chance and then the technologies to develop a superior one particular becomes irrelevant. On the other hand, if you are overrun with mice then the opportunity exists to innovate a product employing your technology.

Yet another example, 1 with which I am intimately familiar, are consumer electronics startup providers. I’ve been connected with each those that succeeded and those that failed. Every possessed distinctive top edge technologies. The distinction was chance. These that failed could not come across the opportunity to create a meaningful innovation using their technology. In fact to survive, these companies had to morph oftentimes into some thing entirely distinctive and if they have been lucky they could take benefit of derivatives of their original technology. Far more frequently than not, the original technologies wound up in the scrap heap. Technology, hence, is an enabler whose ultimate value proposition is to make improvements to our lives. In order to be relevant, it demands to be made use of to create innovations that are driven by opportunity.

Technology as a competitive advantage?

Lots of organizations list a technologies as one of their competitive advantages. Is this valid? In some instances yes, but In most instances no.

youtube to mp3 converter develops along two paths – an evolutionary path and a revolutionary path.

A revolutionary technologies is one which enables new industries or enables options to troubles that had been previously not achievable. Semiconductor technology is a fantastic instance. Not only did it spawn new industries and products, but it spawned other revolutionary technologies – transistor technologies, integrated circuit technology, microprocessor technology. All which supply a lot of of the items and services we consume currently. But is semiconductor technology a competitive benefit? Searching at the number of semiconductor businesses that exist today (with new ones forming every day), I’d say not. How about microprocessor technology? Again, no. Lots of microprocessor corporations out there. How about quad core microprocessor technology? Not as numerous organizations, but you have Intel, AMD, ARM, and a host of providers developing custom quad core processors (Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc). So once more, not considerably of a competitive advantage. Competitors from competing technologies and easy access to IP mitigates the perceived competitive benefit of any distinct technology. Android vs iOS is a good example of how this works. Each operating systems are derivatives of UNIX. Apple utilized their technology to introduce iOS and gained an early market place advantage. Nevertheless, Google, utilizing their variant of Unix (a competing technology), caught up reasonably quickly. The reasons for this lie not in the underlying technologies, but in how the merchandise created feasible by these technologies had been brought to industry (cost-free vs. walled garden, and so forth.) and the differences in the strategic visions of every single organization.

Evolutionary technology is one which incrementally builds upon the base revolutionary technologies. But by it’s very nature, the incremental alter is a lot easier for a competitor to match or leapfrog. Take for example wireless cellphone technology. Firm V introduced 4G merchandise prior to Enterprise A and whilst it could have had a brief term advantage, as soon as Firm A introduced their 4G merchandise, the benefit due to technologies disappeared. The customer went back to deciding upon Corporation A or Firm V primarily based on value, service, coverage, whatever, but not primarily based on technologies. Hence technology might have been relevant in the short term, but in the long term, became irrelevant.

In today’s world, technologies tend to promptly turn into commoditized, and inside any unique technology lies the seeds of its own death.

Technology’s Relevance

This report was written from the prospective of an end consumer. From a developer/designer standpoint factors get murkier. The further 1 is removed from the technology, the less relevant it becomes. To a developer, the technologies can appear like a item. An enabling solution, but a item nonetheless, and therefore it is hugely relevant. Bose uses a proprietary signal processing technology to allow items that meet a set of market requirements and hence the technologies and what it enables is relevant to them. Their customers are additional concerned with how it sounds, what’s the cost, what’s the good quality, etc., and not so a lot with how it is achieved, therefore the technology employed is a lot less relevant to them.