Re: The History of Tech

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In Robert Brook”s ever delightful daily newsletter (you should really subscribe – it’s comforting like having some cookies with your favorite aunt or grandma – or, despite suffering through getting up at 4am in the morning, that serene feeling of fishing on a quiet, dusky lake in the early morning) he quotes Dave Winer:

I wonder if Google employs any historians to advise them on strategies tried in the past and how they turned out.

To which I replied, to Robert: hardly anyone tracks the year-to-year history of technology and strategies therein. I find it incredibly annoying. (Part of the problem is that in the past decade, the thing to cover became the web [Google, Facebook, etc.] instead of software itself.) As Dave points out, this results in countless incidents of buffoonery and is the basis for much of the power (older) tech analysts and executives have: since no one documents this history, they have stronger, history-based intuitions about what will work and not work. 

 
For those who are into that whole “reading books” thing:
 
  • In Search of Stupidity is one of the few books on tech history (I read the first edition – there’s been updates).
  • The Business of Software - the first 1/3 or so is mostly just the history of the software industry. One forgets how dominate IBM was and what a massive disruptor Microsoft was.
  • While Accidental Empires isn’t purely software focused, it’s a damn good history of the tech industry up to around 1990.
If you read those three books, or so, you’ll get that same Winer feeling that things just go in infinite loops, turtles all the way down and all that, in the tech world…and, it’ll make you appreciate how damn hard it is to have true, revolutionary successes & shifts like PCs (!), open source, the web, smartphones/tablets…and how easy & common it is to try the same dumb shit over and over.

Justin Fox By Justin Fox, wired.com It’s an age of…

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Justin Fox
By Justin Fox, wired.com

It’s an age of unprece­dent­ed, stag­ger­ing tech­no­log­i­cal change. Busi­ness mod­els are being trans­formed, lives are being upend­ed, vast new hori­zons of pos­si­bil­i­ty opened up. Or some­thing like that. These are all pret­ty com­mon…

“We have no colonies on Mars, we still can’t get by without prehistoric fuel, the dishwasher still doesn’t get all the dishes clean, and very few of us have personal jetpacks. You call this progress?”

BYOD Still Blocked for Official Work Tasks Isha Suri,…

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BYOD Still Blocked for Official Work Tasks
Isha Suri, siliconangle.com

A recent sur­vey by Mime­cast, a sup­pli­er of cloud-based email archiv­ing, con­ti­nu­ity and secu­ri­ty for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, has revealed that BYOD – Bring Your Own Device is becom­ing a hot topic among enter­pris­es, espe­cial…

The dark horse of BYOD is that employee’s equipment is just better than corp issued equipment (which is viewed as a place to cut costs, not boost worker moral and productivity, never mind all that “mobile worker” stuff.