The Age of Innovation Innocence
Are we too rich
to remember
or too smart to
forget?
Samuel A. Guiberson
Quarterdeck
Magazine, Fall 1992
Ambling the floor plan of yet another mammoth computer trade show, looking into the faces of the “Great Who They Are” that buy and sell and build and code, one fact is obvious. The number of those who seek their fortunes amidst the excitable electrons of these pesky appliances for human insight grows a fresh exponent every year. These faces call the future by a thousand different names, and in as many languages as there are dreams echoing in this giant hall.
No longer is computer technology just a neighborhood footrace where some precocious American kids get to run their heads; it is now an all human race. Before our time in history, what passed for high technology was only a very narrow beam of enlightenment, illuminating no more than a few societies at a time, briefly shining a spotlight on one part of the planet while everyone else took turns sleeping. Now the whole world is awake.
So why do America's PC industry leaders choose now to go back to sleep, to go profoundly deaf to the lessons that gave them the lead? Just at this historic moment when there are more countries forging technology economies, more creative minds being fueled by the twin furies of intellectual and economic freedom than ever before, our high-stakes players want to play the pat, proprietary hand. Is all this regression to the meanness just because there aren't any more profit margins fatter than a corn-fed calf?
Having tossed more creative ingenuity in the disposal than the rest of the world has had to survive on for the last fifty years, we pampered prodigies of the global information revolution appear to have despaired of a market of merit, and have opted instead to lead the world in sleazy monopoly building and marketing tactics that would make used car salesmen blush.
There was a time not long ago when some iconoclastic pups set out to reinvent computing with a free-form, open-minded, nonhierarchical way of thinking that made the personal computer the prime mover, and made the mainframe corporate computer move over.
In historical terms, pig iron computers and pigheaded information management went bottoms-up faster than you can say "top-down.” Born at the Big Bang of the global techno-industrial transformation, our whiz kids, only two milliseconds out from the Event, decide its time to stop whizzing and make like Multinationals. In short, they're out to re-imperialize computing.
Now that the stock is on the Board and the billions are in the bank, the Vision Thing is expendable. Information technology as an agent of change, as the great equalizer of knowledge power, has been voted "sacrifice of the month" in key corporate board rooms. Idealism runs shallow among our infant entrepreneurs when a smaller profit is the price of Change.
The name of the game is "industry standards.” When loosely translated from ad-speak, this means "you're gonna buy ours, not because it's better than theirs, but because the smart money says we can put our competitors out of business with the force of our capital, if not the force of our own ideas.” For those of us who care to pay attention to the way it used to be, that attitude ruled the computer industry not so long ago, and it made for big margins and small minds.
While such corporate practices make for great business school textbook titles like "Boy Meets Market, Boy Eats Market," the culture of our technology suffers. Consumers lose access to innovation as well as access to information. Innovation is lost because it is managed so as to proceed only out of economic expedience. Access to information is lost because computing is priced out of the reach of ordinary people and back where it used to be, into the exclusive grasp of Big Business. Industry research and development then aligns itself beneath a few corporate flags, stagnates into trench warfare, and wastes a generation of creative minds by running them into the machine gun fire of "not invented here.”
When economic power replaces innovative power as the guiding principle, you won't find much fresh produce in the marketplace of ideas.
