Saturday Dec 14, 2024
Saturday Dec 14, 2024
Wednesday, 3 August 2016 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Gitendra E. Chitty
The innovator’s graveyard is where old technology products go to die. It’s kind of like the fabled elephant graveyard of Tintin lore but without the tusks or dung (or surprisingly sage, talking animals).
Unlike your typical graveyard, though, it doesn’t pay to mourn a loss here. Bemoaning the death of good technology is a pointless and artificially emotional exercise. It’s like mourning your favourite shirt after your kid spills paint on it. You loved it, but she decided it looked better in fluorescent yellow. So it is with technology – one generation’s innovation is the next generation’s canvas on which to paint tomorrow’s (techno) billion-dollar masterpiece.
Examples of this innovation-growth-death lifecycle come easily to mind: AOL beat Prodigy, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves displaced AOL, Google demolished Yahoo (and Ask Jeeves died on its own), and so on, and so forth. In the social world, change has been even more rapid than in that ISP and Search arena: Facebook replaced MySpace. LinkedIn took up Facebook’s (obviously) non-corporate 
whitespace. Twitter stole Facebook’s thunder and ate LinkedIn’s status-update lunch. Instagram overtook Twitter for rich visual content. And then Snapchat trumped both of them with content plus visuals plus rapid-consumption privacy. Until came Prisma, which takes your photos and redraws them in the style of Van Gogh, Munch, Degas, or another painter.
Perhaps a NSFW Instagram portrait reimaged as a Boticelli and SnapChatted to a paramour for a blink or two would add a little art to one’s selfie..?
Each of these Social Media iterations incorporated elements of the others, repurposing and recycling and reinventing until only the barest thread of the original DNA remained. Tomorrow, they’ll be replaced by something else. And something thereafter, and thereafter, and thereafter, ad nauseum.
A strategic technologist, then, must be philosophical in his outlook, his subject matter’s progress being ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ as it is. I suspect old Dickens would be proud that his description of two varied cities aptly parallels the vastly different worlds of VHS and Betamax, Compact Flash and Secure Digital, Microsoft Office Desktop and Google Docs/Sheets/Calendar - and lest we forget, the Social grandparents, MySpace and the ubiquitous Facebook.
This fickle and flighty consumer attention deficit syndrome has had broad, deep impact on every industry and across every geopolitical border. Even the little island of Sri Lanka isn’t spared the mainland indignity of rapid obsolescence: just look at its private transportation arena. Five years ago, the fastest way to a Colombo taxi was to phone Kangaroo at 2.588.588. On-demand call-a-cab was a novel concept here, and Kangaroo and its competitors rightfully went from startup to stable faster than their Tata Nano micro-cabs could get to 100 kph.
Last year, Pick Me took the Kangaroo business plan and effectively added an operational appendix saying, “All bookings must go through our online portal, but we offer drivers pre-set fare consistency and passenger volume, while giving customers app-and-GPS-based one-click-to-hail convenience.” And now the industry darling, Uber, has jumped into the game, modifying Pick Me’s model by allowing for credit card billing so you don’t even have to carry cash for the next drunken ride.
All of these taxi companies were brilliant in their era, and yet all shall face rapidly declining market share as the next big transportation archetype is being dreamt up (most likely by three random school kids programming Node.JS in their Harry Potter-themed pajamas).
Dated as they may already have become, each of these businesses was, or will be at some stage, the ‘King of Colombo Cabs’. At that peak point in any startup evolution, technology entrepreneurs and founders are full of bluster and ego, claiming their latest offering is ‘revolutionary’, ‘game changing’, and of course, ‘authentic’. They’re not really to blame, though. After all, it’s the current new-greatest-thing’s job to bury its proverbial Caesar, not praise him.
Our natural role, as the consumers of these fads and fictions and fun-today, forgotten-tomorrow apps and Apples, is to keep what we like and ruthlessly discard what we don’t. Sure, the innovation sphere always going to be rife with ‘disruptive technologies’, ‘unique paradigms’, and ‘game-changing Big Data’ – yet at the end of the day, what was one woman’s Compact Disc music storage device is now her daughter’s retro coffee table coaster. As it very well must be.
I’ve personally fallen trap to the innovator’s graveyard more often than I’d care to remember. There’s a closet in my house full of:
In my defence, these were the must-have, coolest, most cutting-edge gadgets in their categories. Every one pushed the proverbial envelope and paved the way for its descendants. And, like our own ancestors, every one died too soon, leaving naught but a legacy of imagination for its kin to follow.
So what’s the point of innovating, then, if the fruit it bears fall so quickly from the retail tree (pardon the BlackBerry, Apple, and Raspberry Pi pun)? Why is Innovation with a Capital “I” spoken about so often and with such conviction?
Because in the strategy world, success is about straddling the boundary between the tomorrow and the unquestionably insane, using data and gut instinct and raw intelligence to predict what will be and grasp onto that future for as long as possible before the usurpers attack the throne. Edison’s lightbulb, Benz’s automobile, and Zuckerberg’s Facebook served as models for everything thereafter in their respective industries. They were the pioneers of their time, the Kings of Everything and the Kings of Nothing. And that, my friends, is a legacy worth having.
(The writer is Director of KPMG Sri Lanka’s Strategic Advisory practice, having moved to Colombo after 40 years in New York and Los Angeles. His corporate career includes strategic roles in a variety of industries at NEWAsurion, General Electric, Capital Lease, and a host of startups. He holds a BSc from New York University’s Stern School of Business, an MBA from Yale University, and is currently struggling to understand Colombo traffic, land prices and Sinhala.)
