The Technology Gap
It was a beautiful spring Saturday as Silas pulled into Charles City, Iowa. The year was 1901, and in those days, springtime was no time for a farmer to be in town unless you were getting seed, feed, or harness and plow parts.Silas had just finished plowing the north forty and was ready to start putting seed in the ground. John, down at the Feed & Seed, had sent word that last fall's seed order was in, and Silas and his prize mules, Bess and Jude, were there to pick up those sacks of hope for this year's harvest.
Rolling down Main Street, Silas noticed a new establishment with what he would later describe to his wife as a "damn fool contraption" out front. Fascinated, his body passed by on the wagon seat but his eyes wouldn't, and Silas had to pull back on Bess and Jude when his neck ran out of travel. That's when Silas met Charles.
Introducing himself as a tractor salesman, Charles Parr was too modest. While he and his partner, Charles Hart, were not the first to build a gas traction engine, they were the first to build a factory in the United States to produce them, and they were the first to call them tractors.
Silas, it turns out, was the very first prospect for the Hart-Parr No.1 tractor.
The First Technology Gap
Extolling the virtues of gas powered agriculture, Charles introduced his new technology with words like: new, faster, productive, and efficient. To which Charles asked, quite seriously, "Where do I hitch THEM?" as he rolled his head and eyes toward Bess and Jude.
Undaunted, no doubt anticipating such an objection, Charles astonished Silas with his answer, "Well, with the Hart-Parr No.1, you won't need THEM anymore."
And if it wasn't already abundantly clear that this moment in history was lost on this technology pedestrian, Silas' next question removed all doubt when he asked, "How do I put the harness on it?"
While the facts in this story about Charles Parr and his tractor are historically accurate, Silas, and therefore the meeting, are fictional and a product of how I imagine the first occurrence of a technology gap: the first time a dirt farmer met a tractor salesman.
The New Technology Gap
Simply stated, a technology gap exists when consumers are indifferent, or unable, to keep pace with technological innovations. And in this definition, "consumers" means both individuals and organizations. Once a gap exists, it is either closed by consumer adoption - Silas and his fellow farmers ultimately did purchase a lot of tractors during the 20th century; or it collapses when innovation diminishes due to market forces and the laws of economics.
A hundred years after the first Hart-Parr No.1 was built, Patrick Moorhead, Vice President of Consumer Advocacy at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), called me to ask if I thought a technology gap exists today. You won't be surprised to learn that I had an opinion. My answer was, yes. Definitely.
AMD has decided to study the new technology gap, and Pat asked me to join their Global Consumer Advisory Board (GCAB). The GCAB is an international group of 14 technology, consumer, and small business experts whom AMD is bringing together to assist Pat, who is also the GCAB Chairman, in this project.
A hundred years ago you could load most technology offerings on Silas' wagon and pull it with the rest. Today, few words in the contemporary lexicon paint with a broader brush than technology.
The information/technology industry has dozens of sectors, thousands of hardware and software offerings, plus a myriad of connectivity options. Consequently, unlike the earlier technology gap, where the challenge was a simple but fully entrenched paradigm, this new one is multi-faceted, very complicated, and as I have learned through my GCAB participation, globally diverse.
The Not-Ready-For-Gap Players
There are two players in a technology gap: consumers and innovators. The gap phenomenon is made possible because consumers - always fickle - only consume when they are motivated; and innovators - always motivated - never tire of innovating, pushing the next generation envelope, and bringing new products to market.
Unlike Silas, most of us consumers have not been resistant to harnessing technology. In the past 20 years, we've embraced new technology - PCs, cell phones, the Internet, email, and associated convergence opportunities - at a pace as unprecedented as the innovations we've adopted and adapted our lives and businesses around.
But as Silas might have said, the chickens have now come home to roost, and the technology gap exists today due to saturation, with no new killer application - like a tractor replacing a mule, or a PC replacing an Underwood 5 - on the horizon. A recent Odyssey Homefront survey put these "chickens" in 21st century terms when it reported that U.S. households intending to purchase a PC in the near future declined from a high of 12% in 1999, to barely 7% in 2001.
The PC is but one of many modern technology innovations. But more than any other, and at least for now, it is the icon of latter-day technology and the bellwether for a technology gap.
PC Waves
There have been two waves of PC adoption: First, PCs - and the software developed for it - vastly improved information creation and management as it replaced typewriters and word processors, calculators and ledgers, typesetters and manually created graphics. Then there was the Internet wave that created dot com delirium, and the PC got a new lease on life as the ticket to ride in cyberspace.
Many technology adopters in the past few years did so merely to claim a piece of the cyber-action. And now that essentially everyone in the industrialized world who wants a PC has one, and now that the Internet and email are old news used more as tools than for entertainment value, many dot com consumers have put their technology, literally or metaphorically, in the same place as last year's exercise equipment.
Waiting On The Killer App
Once Silas had adopted the ability to plow the north forty with a tractor, until Charles came up with a better plowing technology, showing him a faster tractor may or may not have motivated him to make another purchase before his old tractor wore out. Now that I have the ability to create electronic information, manage it, share it, and build a community in cyberspace, until you WOW me with a new killer app, merely offering a one gigahertz PC may or may not motivate me to replace last year's 800 megahertz model.
Humans can appreciate being able to plow the north forty in one day instead of three, but most of us are not capable of finding a value proposition in processing at 30 nanoseconds instead of 50ns. Speed is merely a feature and not a benefit if consumers feel they are already going fast enough, whether you're talking about a PC, a hard drive, or an Internet connection.
Hence, the current technology gap - at least one aspect of it. Actually, there are many, as you will see in future articles in this space.
Write this on a rock... The current technology gap will end when innovators offer consumers benefits instead of features; applications instead of bells and whistles. Until then, much to the chagrin of the innovators, our Bess and Jude equivalents - the technology we already own - will do just fine.
