What if our tech is good enough?
techradar.com
techradar.com
I don't believe this for a second. I'm sure people said the same thing about smartphones before the iPhone. Yes, some categories of technology are mature, but innovation is also about the creation of entirely new categories that we can't currently foresee.
upgrading from an iPod that stores your entire music collection to one that can store your collection twice is nowhere near as exciting.
It is, because my collection is now twice as large.
I personally don't store that much music, but I love video. So it now completely sucks that I can't store much video on it, certainly not enough for me not to spend an hour every week changing up the videos.
I guess it says something when my 500GB external hard drive isn't big enough anymore. My next computer purchase is going to be a 4 bay NAS, then I can upgrade it 1TB at a time.
The title of this should really be, "Why don't people realize that our tech still sucks?"
You're taking improvement in technology; he's talking demand for that improvement. Sure, you can make a car that will do 200mph - and what's the market for that? How about a car that uses less fuel, has crumple zones and airbags, easier to park, looks cool, feels great to drive, accelerates well and has seats that smell like leather?
You can buy an 8 inch hard disk drive with a hugely larger capacity than a 3.5 inch one you have, and that is also cheaper per GB. But you don't buy the 8 inch one, because the smaller drives have enough capacity for your needs: they are "good enough". Because of lower fixed costs, they are also cheaper (for that capacity). And they'll fit in your laptop.
I concede that the expression "good enough" is misleading. He's using it in the sense of "The Innovators Dilemma". It's the basis of each disruptive revolution in computers, and it takes almost everyone by surprise. We keep on improving aspect X, and everyone loves it! Until one day, they stop buying it. How come? I don't know, let's just make X even better!
The idea is that people buy something based on a mix of benefits, things like features, performance, reliability, convenience, and price. Saying that one of these attributes is not "good enough", is a way of saying that "there is demand for more of it". The vendor who can supply the best improvement, in terms of the current mix of demand, wins. It's usually seen as one key benefit, and the rest are secondary. That's where the competition is focussed. And this keeps on going for years, decades. Everybody works at improving that aspect, because people demand more of it. But if it eventually saturates the demand for it, people can't use a faster car, they can't absorb more capacity: it finally is "good enough". This is another way of saying that there is now demand for more of some other attribute instead of that one. And competition shifts to that attribute.
This plays out all the time in technology markets: e.g. once it's fast enough for their needs, people prefer to buy something cheaper instead of faster. Sure, it can be faster, but that's irrelevant if no one wants it.
Fortunately, the demand doesn't usually disappear, but switches to somewhere else, so there is still demand for tech improvements - just different ones.
When purchasing a new product, the perceived advantage is always weighed against its additional cost, having to let go of something one 'is familiar with', backward compatability with other possessions that are retained, etc. If the manufacturer does not succeed in convincing consumers that there is something to be gained by 'upgrading', they will not upgrade.
Now I concede that, at the moment, you are probably right: lots of new and improved technologies that will hit the markets the next ten years will be perceived as having sufficient advantage (to replace currently owned products) and they will be purchased.
However, in the long run, I think there must come a point when the author's argument will turn out to be valid. That's when new technologies just do not offer enough advantage to be profitable in the consumer market. Of course, every technology faces this problem at some point: it reaches a stable end-of-life fase and manufacturers deal with it in various ways. Some old types of CPU, radio's and the lightbulb are interesting case studies. The main question is whether there will come a point when this holds for the majority of technological innovations, in such a way that the consumer market for 'new' products vanishes all across the 'technological' consumer product market.
As far as long-term effects are concerned, there may be a time when we decide that there's not much left to do, but I'm willing to bet that it's not anytime even remotely soon. A lot of people have been impressed or overwhelmed by the things we achieved during the 90's and 00's; their kids won't be. Looking at some of the areas from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569103, you can see how far we have yet to go.
However, that day will be the day when no one on Earth has any problems anymore, because technology is used to solve problems. That may happen if we destroy ourselves, or if we reach a peak of technological achievement such that we are effectively gods.
I hope the former won't happen in my lifetime, and I suspect we'll have to wait a while for the latter.
I found the argument fascinating: he claimed that the dramatic growth of the computing industry was fueled by more people having access to computers. Beginning with mainframes, through to minicomputers, workstations and PCs, each wave was cheaper and was affordable to a much larger number of people. This increasingly larger audience is what fueled the growth. But such growth can't continue forever; eventually everyone has one. At that point, they still buy upgrades and replacements, but the dramatic rate of sales must drop back.
I think that's where the first world is today, and developing nations aren't that far behind. Of course, we'll still have new devices (iPhones, kindles, and others-yet-to-be-invented), but the computing industry as such won't grow at the unsustainably dramatic rates of previous decades.
Aside from slowing of initial productivity gains in the broad application of commoditized digital mathematics (i.e. computers) to human endeavors, technology growth is actually accelerating in many areas including: biology, materials science, pure mathematics (algorithms are actually a technology), metrology (think 'Large Hadron Collider'), and tribology (lubrication, and friction).
The wrongly attributed "640k is all anyone will ever need" quote comes to mind. What a horrid piece of "jurinalism".
I think it would be a dangerous thing for the technology industry to fall into the trap of thinking what we have is good enough and killing innovation. Even if the product is good enough there has to be a driving force to constantly improve.
There is lots of possibility for computing that just isn't attainable with current machines. Things that probably weren't even thought of when we were back a stage from where we are now.
That's a bit misleading. There was never any transition from 720p to 1080p.
Consider games for an example of poorly invested resources. The graphics have improved dramatically in video games between the era of Chrono Trigger ('95) and now. The quality of the games has declined. These two trends are linked together. Now that the budget for a game is in the 7- and 8-digit range, business people have creative control over games, and games are more likely to be designed by committee. Thus, they end up sucking. Improving the graphics will not solve this problem, but there's still demand for high-quality games that is not being met through traditional channels.
Remember when every game was trying to push an adorable cartoon mascot? Do you think the business people weren't behind that too?
While good graphics are certainly no substitute for good gameplay, there are certainly far more AAA titles available now than there ever has been.
Some come from large studios: Left for Dead, Bioshock, Fallout. Others are coming from the emerging indie scene like World of Goo and Braid.