High Tech Myth #6: Products are Adopted Faster
Future Hype; The Myths of Technology Change, analyzes and debunks the High Tech Myths, nine fashionable but deceptive explanations for how technology works today. This is Myth #6.
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Web time [is] seven times faster than normal time.
-- Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)
Another popular argument states that products are reaching us increasingly quickly. The US Department of Commerce outlined the argument this way: "Radio was in existence 38 years before 50 million people tuned in; TV took 13 years to reach that benchmark. Sixteen years after the first PC kit came out, 50 million people were using one. Once it was opened to the general public, the Internet crossed that line in four years."
This is hardly a fair comparison. Fifty million people were half the US population when radio was introduced, but only 20 percent when the Web started. The "once it was open to the general public" caveat for the Internet is also important. The Internet began in 1969. This means that 22 years of money and research from the government and universities nurtured it before it was opened to the public in 1991. And even at its starting point in 1969, the Internet wasn't built from scratch, like radio or the telegraph, but was built on the infrastructure and experience of the telephone industry.
This is rather like a bamboo plant that builds its root infrastructure for years and then bursts forth with a new shoot that grows a foot or more per day. It can be said that the bamboo grows to full height in a month, but that ignores the years of preparation that made it possible. Not only was the Internet nurtured for decades before the Web was introduced, but by the time it was opened to the public, the home PC industry was already well established. From the consumer standpoint, the Internet was born with the technological equivalent of a silver spoon in its mouth.
This quote could be more honestly written as follows.
The first radio broadcast was in 1906. About 23 years later, radio was mature enough for consumer use and receivers were in 2% of American households. Radio was in 50% of households in seven more years. Television, invented two decades later, had a similar progression: 24 years to reach 2% penetration and six more years to reach 50%.
If we take the year the first microprocessor was built (1971) as the start of the PC industry, it took little more than a decade to reach 2%. Its gestation was much faster than that of radio and TV because the PC did not need as much infrastructure. Nevertheless, it took almost two more decades for PCs to reach 50% penetration, three times longer than radio or TV.
The Internet was begun in 1969 as a government-funded research project. It was opened to commercial use the same year the Web was launched, in 1991. To reach 2% household penetration took 24 years, and it hit 50% after an additional seven years.
What conclusions can we draw? The evidence for accelerating technology change has evaporated, and we can see that successful products over the past century have had similar gestation times and growth rates and that modern inventions have not reached the market unusually quickly. However, it's interesting that the PC, one of the poster children of the our-times-are-unprecedented mindset, grew so much more slowly than radio and TV. Don't think that the PC carried a heavier burden because it was expensive. A 1981 PC was half the relative cost of a 1939 television and one tenth that of a 1908 Model T (these three dates are the first time their respective products were made available to the general public).
We'll take a final look at this question of how fast technology moved by looking at a very old example, cathedral construction in the medieval period. The difficulty of these projects is staggering. Imagine a cavernous, handmade stone building over 400 feet long with 12 stories of open space inside. The primitive cement of the time does little more than fill the gaps between the stones and will break if tension (pulling force) develops. Builders could validate new techniques and designs only through experiment. Most are illiterate, and they learned their skills through apprenticeship rather than books or schools. Architecture is not yet a science, and failed experiments can cost lives and years of work. There are no cranes, trucks, or power tools--there are not even any blueprints. This was the challenge facing the town of Chartres, France in 1194.
Despite these difficulties, the stunning Chartres cathedral, which still stands today, was almost completely built within 30 years. Salisbury cathedral in England, of similar dimensions and begun a few decades later, took less than 40 years. It is humbling to note that Washington's National Cathedral took more than twice this long, and New York City's St. John cathedral is still unfinished after over a century of work. The common perception of medieval cathedrals requiring centuries of work from generation after generation of stonemasons is quaint but not always true. When funds were available, as they were for Chartres and Salisbury, work proceeded quickly. When they are not, as in these modern examples, work halts. Only by picking and choosing examples can one argue for cathedrals--or technology in general--that technology changes ever faster.
