The Nose Knows
July 16, 2017
One of the key characteristics of technology companies that they act like a food chain. By that I mean bigger tech companies will gobble-up smaller tech companies:
This applies to massive whales like Google, Apple and Microsoft consuming smaller more agile tech start-ups (which to them are just upstarts) but also, in the nature of technology, we see the technology beast chewing on its own tail. For the technology itself the food chain works in reverse.
As an example, you can take a mammoth IBM 3390 $250,000 storage device (disk drive) circa 1980:
This drive can store a whopping 1.78GB or 3.78GB! Between times we arrived at 3½ inch PC hard-drives:
And have recently landed up with SD cards:
From this we saw SD card evolution:
SD Card > Mini SD > Micro SD > Cloud Storage (invisible)
We see the same sort of thing with connection technologies
USB 1 > USB 2 > USB 3 > Thunderbolt 4 > Wireless tech (invisible)
In wireless, we only see routers and adaptors but it’s certainly true here too:
Wireless-a > Wireless-b > Wireless-g > Wireless-n > Wireless-ac > Wireless-ax
Fast wireless and mobile connectivity means that even connection technologies also become invisible. With omnipresent mobile connectivity, there are no visible routers or hubs, dongles or plugs. We are connected everywhere all the time.
So once technologies have consumed all the physically larger tech relics, in the end it too disappears into a puff of smoke like the magic genie in the bottle.
Even companies that sell tech, connectors and boxes with tech inside them, have also disappeared. Dick Smith bricks and mortar only exist in degrading brains and bitmapped images. You need to go to the web and do an archaeological dig (aka Google Search) and you will find Dick has become a pale imitation of his former glory. Nobody loves connectors, dongles and adaptors except Apple. Without the love the tech dies.
People do love tech, but what they really love is ‘new tech’. Old tech . . . not so much. So, what does new tech look like? Well it’s smaller and, ideally, it’s invisible like nanotech. It’s smart and automated. It’s not just for Hi-tech giants, it’s for fish of all sizes in the food chain. You need to pay attention because your old tech might start smelling a bit fishy. The nose knows!
