Best Buy has stopped selling CDs. This technology would seem to finally be dead.
compact disks pronounced dead
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Tag Archives: creative destruction
Google leading the self-driving car race
There has been some talk of the traditional Detroit car companies competing with Google (aka Alphabet, aka Waymo?) head to head in the development and commercialization of self-driving cars. But according to Bloomberg, that isn’t going to happen. Losers.
the tech revolution and the engineering, architecture and construction industry
This article from Engineering News Record tries to answer the question of what the tech revolution means for the engineering, architecture, and construction industry.
As the world around us becomes more technology-driven and sophisticated, what will that mean for A/E/C? It’s been well-documented that the construction industry productivity gains in the past 40 years have been paltry, and that’s perhaps stating it lightly. So how can we go to IBM’s Watson for legal advice (yup, Watson will put a lot of lawyers out of business), get advanced health screening on our smartphones, obtain a master’s degree on our tablet computer, and then turn around and tolerate 20th century design and construction approaches? How can we allow technology companies to create massively personalized customer experiences, and then deal with a lack of communication and transparency on our construction projects, or dumb models (even worse, 2-D printed drawings!) with meaningless data?
We can’t. Our clients won’t. We need to embrace technology, get comfy with data, and revolutionize the client experience.
I figured the article would elaborate on the three suggestions above, but it doesn’t, really. I think our industry lags behind for a few reasons. First, we design and build things that last a long time, like highways, sewer pipes, buildings, etc. Even if the level of knowledge and technology relating to these things is increasing, they don’t get replaced very often. When individual little pieces of our transportation and water systems break, we replace them with similar or incrementally improved pieces, because it doesn’t seem to make sense to replace the whole system with something radically different all at once, even if that could be the right long-term answer. University curricula, professional groups, labor groups, institutions such as utilities and authorities, licensing and credentialing programs, and their associated lobbyists arise to resist change and perpetuate the status quo. Engineers and architects aren’t really trained in long-term planning or system thinking. There is a planning field that sort of is, but we constantly beat them down and encourage them to conform to short-term thinking so they can remain employed in our industry. In private consulting we talk about serving our clients all day long, but there is really a revolving door between private industry and public clients and not a whole lot of room for new and revolutionary thinking to enter the mix. Truly disruptive technology like self-driving cars leading to drastically reduced demand for private vehicle ownership, and drastically reduced demand for paved surfaces, could eventually push out some of the old thinking. It’s hard to imagine the water or environmental equivalent, but maybe a truly revolutionary toilet that doesn’t require a sewer system at all could be an example. Truly revolutionary building materials like cheap carbon fiber could be another.
automation in the coal industry
The simplistic image of “coal jobs” meaning miners toiling underground is no longer accurate given the increasing automation of the coal industry, according to Bloomberg.
Coal miners no longer swing a pickax or wield a shovel. While coal companies are hiring again, executives are starting to search for workers who can crunch gigabytes of data or use a joystick to maneuver mining vehicles hundreds of miles away…
“Whether coal comes back or not is not necessarily directly related to jobs,” Heath Lovell, a spokesman for coal producer Alliance Resource Partners LP, said in an interview on NPR’s “On Point.” “We should be becoming more and more efficient, which would mean we could produce the same amount of coal with less employees…”
One irony for the industry now is that in some areas the coal companies say they can’t find the high-skilled workers they need. In West Virginia, companies are resorting to offering signing bonuses and fully paid healthcare to poach experienced shift foremen, mechanics and electricians from rivals. Many of those workers left the coal industry during the last decade’s collapse and found more stable employment in other sectors. They aren’t anxious to switch back.
Tech vs. Telecom
Are the big telecom companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon tech companies? Or are they giant, lumbering change-averse utilities of yesteryear? Well, they’re sort of in-between. I would like to see Comcast succeed because they are a major employer and providing support to local startups in my city. And yet, I have had awful experiences with them and just dropped them in favor of Verizon. I’ll be happy with Verizon until my introductory promotion runs out.
These companies are not good enough. They are not providing the kind of internet we need at a price we can afford. This article in Wired says Apple, Google, and Facebook will end up eating them alive, by accident.
These tech titans didn’t plan to take down the telcos. But they depend upon you having fast, reliable internet, so they’re bringing everything in-house. This promises to make things drastically better for you as a consumer, so if you hate big telecoms, you’ll feel schadenfreude at their demise. But you might end up with more of the same as the new guard becomes the old guard…
You’ve probably heard about Google Fiber and its shift toward wireless Internet over fiber-optic cables. Google Fi mobile service could be even more radical. Instead of building cell towers, Google resells access to Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Companies like Cricket and TracFone do this too, but Google-Fi lets your phone use the best signal available at any moment…
As new technologies and expanded access to the wireless spectrum drive down the cost of operating cell services, Google and other wireless brokers will be able to create nationwide–even worldwide–networks. That would make wireless service a commodity and shift the balance of power from incumbents like AT&T to companies like Google.
I wonder what major industry will be the next to go down. Will it be the fossil fuel industry challenged by renewables (the coal industry is already close to collapse), the finance industry challenged by upstart new financial tech companies (if they don’t shoot themselves in the foot again first), or the traditional telecoms falling to the new tech giants?
a career in ice delivery
Apparently, not only was ice delivery a pretty good business early in the 20th century, but ice delivery men also did okay with the ladies. I guess not too many ladies could afford a pool boy back then. But in all seriousness, the transition from ice to refrigeration is a pretty interesting case of a new technology displacing an old. It took about 10 years for sales of the new technology to exceed the old, and about 30 years for the ice box to go away entirely.
In Philadelphia, one major ice company, Knickerbocker, had massive plants, one with 125 employees and storage capacity for a million tons throughout the city. With the help of 1,200 horses and mules, Knickerbocker drivers kept more than 500 delivery wagons mobile on the streets. At the start of the 20th century, America seemed to need every last one its 1,320 ice plants. And the nation’s iceboxes multiplied. Between 1889 and 1919, the value [of] iceboxes manufactured in the United States increased from $4.5 million to $26 million…In 1920, a household refrigerator cost $600 (more than $7,500 in today’s dollars) and broke down about every tenth week…
Between 1920 and 1925, the number of refrigerators in American kitchens rose from 4,000 to 75,000. In 1926 they boomed to 248,000 units and by 1928, 468,000. The following year, Frigidaire manufactured its millionth refrigerator. By 1930, the sales of electric household refrigerators surpassed those of iceboxes…By 1940, 63 percent of all households had refrigerators—13.7 million of them. Four years later, 85 percent of America’s kitchens were equipped…
By 1953, when the last U.S. icebox manufacturer went out of business, the young, virile delivery man carrying dripping, often dirty, blocks of ice into millions of clean American kitchens, the man whose proximity to wives and daughters fueled countless rumors, would-be scandals and jokes on stage and screen, that man, the iceman, finally found a new home—and new purpose—in nostalgia purgatory.
And now , just because, the relevant Top Gun clip:
electric cars
This article argues that electric cars could be about to take off in a big way, and draws an analogy to the disruption of the cell phone industry caused by the iPhone.
In 2007, Nokia was the biggest and most fashionable name in cell phones, with an unassailable lead in hand-held technology. Things had been so good for so long that company executives saw little chance for any competitive challenge–phones were a tough business, they said, and Nokia was reaping the harvest of decades of hard work that no one else could hope to match.
That June, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. And seven years later, Nokia—worth a quarter of a trillion dollars at its apex—abjectly sold off its much-diminished phone division to Microsoft. The price was $7 billion, less than 3% of its former value…
On March 31, his Tesla Motors unveiled its long-promised Model 3, a $35,000 electric car that will go 215 miles per charge… In addition to GM’s Chevy Bolt, Nissan will produce a second-generation Leaf with the same 200-mile range and approximately $35,000 price; it will come in 2017. Before that, Toyota will deliver its Prius Prime, a plug-in hybrid; and BMW already has its pure electric i3. The other major carmakers are piling in as well by the end of the decade.
Before the iPhone, some of the best recent examples of disruption are the digital camera displacing the film camera (much to Kodak’s surprise) and the internet all but destroying the newspaper industry. And you could argue that these are no more revolutionary than the advent of automobiles, electricity, steam, and so on back through history. But the point is big technological advances happen in fits and starts on a regular basis, and will continue to do so however surprised and complacent we may continue to be.