Category Archives: Technology

History, Technology

The Wristwatch—Extraordinary Ordinary Things

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“Say, what time is it?” If you are like most people, you will take a glance at your wristwatch and quickly give the answer.

Today, the wristwatch is almost as much a part of us as our skin; however, just over a century ago, this wasn’t the case. In earlier agricultural populations, few people were concerned about the exact time because they didn’t need to be. Concern about approximate, if not exact time, was essentially in the domain of kings and emperors, servants of such royal personages, and the aristocracy, who represented only a miniscule fraction of the population. It is really only since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century that knowing the exact time has become a significant concern to a significant portion of the population.

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History, Technology

Rubber—Extraordinary Ordinary Things

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Rubber is one of the most common substances in the modern world, and certainly one of the most undervalued. If you ask someone to quickly name a product made of rubber, you are likely to get a reply such as a pencil eraser, rubber band (“elastic band” in Britain), rubber bathmat, rubber stamp, rubber toys, rubber balloons, etc. On further reflection, the person might add objects such as garden hoses, aprons, surfing wet suits, gloves, etc.

By themselves, none of these things have radically changed our social environment and how we go about our lives in it. However, take away any one of them and we are likely to feel a significant difference. This is why I believe rubber justifiably deserves to hold a place in the list of what I like to call “extraordinary ordinary things.”

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Technology

Extraordinary Ordinary Things: Credit cards and beyond

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The first part of this two-part blog, published last month, explored the fundamental ideas of money. Here are some key things to bear in mind as we continue our exploration of this endlessly fascinating subject.

  1. Money is a universal token (metal coins and paper bills) having a value that is expected, but not guaranteed, to be stable over time and is trusted by the people. This trust is usually established by a national government issuing and standing behind its currency (dollars, euros, francs, kroners, pounds, pesos, etc.).
  2. Money is a great facilitator of exchange transactions (buying and selling), the core of commerce.
  3. Money has no intrinsic value. Even when money is equated with silver or gold, the value of money can fluctuate with the prices of these metals.
  4. Money must move quickly and seamlessly from one place to another in today’s largely integrated worldwide society, which was not previously the case in local, largely isolated agricultural societies.

In short, to a large extent, the legitimacy and value of money is whatever a national government says it is.

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Hardware, Technology

The 50-year Inflection Point

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A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.

—Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive (1988)

In the late 1960s Intel sniffed the winds of change and made a dramatic decision to build microprocessors instead of random access memory, RAM. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove describes this abrupt change in Intel’s strategy as an inflection point. As we know from mathematics, the coordinates of an inflection point are where a curve changes direction—typically from up to down or the reverse. In the case of young Intel, the RAM business was no longer profitable, and yet, the profitability of microprocessor chips was totally unknown. It was a choice between dying along with the RAM market or possibly dying with an unproven product in a non-existent market. We now know Grove was right, but he could have been wrong. Such is the life of an entrepreneur.

It has been 50 years since Intel’s inflection point was recognized and then mostly forgotten. But the company and the industry it grew up with is facing another inflection point—the demise of Dennard scaling—the 1974 rule that the power consumption of CMOS chips remains constant as transistors are scaled down in size. Continue reading The 50-year Inflection Point →

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