Pat asks have we over innovated?, to which Robin gives a resounding no.
Pat’s argument could be extended to plenty of other areas of technology. Take social networking, the tech-du-jour. How many of your friends have LinkedIn pages? How many are on Facebook? MySpace? blogs? Twitter? etc., etc., etc…. I think the simple fact is that many people never catch up. There will always be a spectrum of technology users, some in the vanguard and some in the rearguard. Waiting for the rearguard to catchup means stagnation.
Stagnation notwithstanding, one of the problems with this level of innovation is that if you miss a wave, it’ll be difficult, if not impossible to catch the next one, because you’ll have no frame of reference for it. How do you explain to your mother, who can’t program the VCR, what a Facebook page is, and what’s it’s for? You can’t, that’s how. The leap of understanding is simply too great for the vast majority of people to make.
So we should continue to innovate, create, push the boundaries. But don’t expect that we’ll always manage to drag the masses behind us.
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Hi Steve,
The issue isn’t we can’t drag the masses with us - they’ll follow. We just need to make it valuable enough for them to follow. If technology is not your passion or career it is not a priority to
10 years ago, ever think you’d see an elderly person adopt SMS? Once the value reached a measurable amount (their sons/daughters could use it to keep in touch with them in a nursing home) it tipped.