Wharton Chapter 5 - Public Policy and Lessons from the Internet

This chapter of the Wharton book discusses the role of government in emerging technologies and how they help/hinder this process. The chapter analyzes the events that occurred with the introduction and adoption of the internet and how the government handled these changes.

While the government has control to monitor, tax, and set policy to disrupt technologies, they also have the power to create technology infrastructure through institutional infrastructure and research infrastructure. The government can set standards and regulations on the technologies while also offering subsidies to help emerging technologies get started.

The government helped start the ARPA net in the late 1960’s for the Department of Defense. ARPA was stabilized and the NSFnet was born for the use of academic research. In 1990, ARPA was shutdown and moved to NSFnet. During this time, technology projects were nurtured and became a testbed for techhnology.

In the early 1990’s, the NSFnet changed due to three major developments:
· NSF net was no longer privatized and moved toward a for-profit model. NSF moved to pritized backbone and NSF no longer existed by 1995
· Protocols and standard for data to travel over the internet were invented and put into place by CERN. First web browser was built by NCSA for use on the WWW
· By the early 90’s, over 30% of US households owned a MAC or PC

Lessons from the Internet:
1. Government can play a powerful roles in shaping the development of a new technology in its earliest research stage (i.e. as seen in incubating this technology in ARPA and NFSnet)
2. Withdrawal of government support for a research effort is resisted by the beneficiaries as the effort gets closer to commercialization (subsidies disappear and universities, science labs, etc suffer)
3. Government can help manage the transition from public (educational institutions, research labs) to the private sector (commericialization) but everyone will complain. Government had trouble determining and regulating the information that should be available to the public sector (ie. hate or sexually explicit information).
4. Public concern about these new technologies on social mores and how the government should intervene to limit these impacts. These impacts including legal issues, intellectual property infringement, and national security must all be addressed by the government
5. Commercial and government interests will seek a government or legal response to disruptions caused by technology. These disruptions include cellular technology, broadband technology, and “hard” /”soft” networks. These entities want to know if these services are available to all, affordable to all, efficiently provided at a “reasonable quality”, and who is making all the money on these services (i.e. monopoly)
6. A new technology leads to demand universal service for all and the needs for governmental intervention. New regulations are set in place to provide a set quality of service on the technology (i.e. the cable companies outage example)
7. Dominant firms may treat customers poorly which leads to regulation. A monopoly can increase pricing structures on technology and lead to excess profits.
8. Regulation and Antitrust help prevent a single firm from gaining a “dominant market position” through a new technology. “Closed computing architecture” and vertical integration can all lead to an issue in public policy.
9. Technology leads to a firm’s dominance in a confined marketplace and there is need for political governance to prevent the firm from vertically integrating. The technologies can lead to a monopolistic approach in the market allowing a firm to push out the competition.
10. Regulations can have unintended side effects on emerging technology. Regulations can push competitors out of the market by creating unintentional barriers to entry.

These lessons when paired with the internet example truly show how an emerging technology can both grow and be stifled by governmental policy. Government policy can help emerging technologies become more widely accepted, integrated, and maintained through regulations and policies. These same policies can have a negative impact on the technologies as well (as see in Lesson 10).

The development of experimental pharmaceutical drugs may go through a similar process. The government gives subsidies to research institutions for developing drugs to cure the ailing people of the world. After the drugs become commercialized, regulation by the FDA is set in place to ensure the drugs are safe. The drugs are then allowed to be sold to other pharmaceutical companies as generics to prevent a monopoly in the marketplace.

Wharton Chapter 4 - Identification and Assessment of Emerging Technologies

The elements most important in this chapter pertain to the assessment and identification of emerging technologies in the marketplace. Companies should "choose technologies based on the understanding of market potential" to be successful. The R&D process uses a dynamic approach to help determine the risk and value of the technology and the potential lifecycle. The 4 assessment steps to emerging technology are:

• Scoping - scope and domain of the technology should be based on the firms capabilities + the opportunity and threats as a result of the technology. Scoping is the direction based on the companies core competencies.


• Searching - determine the sources and information to follow to determine feasibility and viability. This is usually done by looking internal to the company for new technologies, external companies such as universities and governments, and external literature such as Lexis Nexis and other trade publications. Look for strong signals-citations in publications and following the action of the firms competitors. Keeping track of this information is crucial when searching for emerging technologies.


• Evaluating - technology should be evaluated against the capabilities of the company and the needs of the target market. These technologies are ranked based on financial, risk, and other criteria to determine impact on the firm and the potential market.


• Committing - how the firm should choose to proceed with the technology. Before a company commits resources, time, and money into a technology, they typically follow four types of strategies -"watch and wait" to see how the technology evolves and see how the technology is implemented and perform a quick taker, "Position and Learn" to learn more about the technology and place the firm in a position to implement, "Sense and Follow" is when the company invests the money and chooses to implement, "Believe and Lead" the firm fully commits its resources.

The four step approach allows the firm to find the technology for the customers that will be sustainable in the market, gathers information about the technology by examing the competition and information from external publications, evaluates the data collected from the "searching" phase, and makes a recommendation on whether to fully commit and implement or wait and watch to see how things change in the market.

This approach has been used by Sony with the introduction of the mini disc player. Sony created a device that allowed consumers to listen to digital music on a tiny music player that was not succeptible to the same issues of carrying CD's. The mini discs were small, lightweight, and protected from accidental scratching due to the plastic encasement that covered the mini CD. The technology hit the markets and performed very well in Europe but struggled in the US markets. With competitors using small, large-capacity hard drives and flash memory, the mini discs could not compete in storage capacity. Mini discs also required proprietary disc drives to read the media outside of it's native player. But, the minidisc was the building block for the next generation of portable music players like the iPod with it's non-skip technology of buffering the music into temporary memory (http://www.minidisc.org/minidisc_faq.html)

Google Apps in the Enterprise

In reading the article, Google takes a more unorthodox approach to presenting it SaaS solution to enterprises. By focusing on making the enterprise apps simple and easy to use, they overlook the complex needs of many organizations. But, in googles defense, they are able to adapt and change quickly with the business environment.

The idea of dealing with chaos in the enterprise business environment baffles me. Google's approach is to just search to find things rather than organize them in a meaningful structure. For A type personalities and those that need this structure, this system will be difficult to adapt to. By organizing data, I think it is easier for humans to see relationships in data. By searching on random keywords, these relationships can get missed or be clouded from view.

Taking control from the organization will be a huge change for many. With "willy-nilly" realease schedules, or those schedules deemed by google, suddenly take control away from IT with regards to upgrades, maintenance, and downtime. And not having a choice on new feature sets will drive many organizations crazy!

A replacement for office you say? If organizations do simple word documents or excel sheets without anything fancy, I could understand this statement. A "lite" version may hit most users but Office 2007 can produce amazing business literature using fonts, formats, graphics, and templates. But, Office does not support collaboration of files (OneNote is the exception) whereas this is one great strength of Google apps. Google Apps has a long way to go if they are to complete with Microsoft as a replacement technology without being able to support all levels of users in an organization. But, for 1 year of development, Google is doing well.

The mobile office and working off-line are interesting concepts to consider. With the ability to work offline, users are free to work from wherever as long as they have an internet connection. Now if the organization loses their internet connection for a few hours, EVERY user must work offline. This is much more detrimental to an organization. And, like the article mentioned, reimbursing employees for internet can be quite costly.

The product strengths of GAPE are relevant and good selling points for Google. But, possible enterprise customers should really look into what GAPE will not do for the organization. With 99.9% uptime for email only, as a customer, this would make me nervous. If my business relies on these apps to do business, I would expect the same uptime for all applications. And the clause for "not responsible for lost data, profits, or revenue" would make me think twice. With my IT staff, I can at least ensure backups are performed at regular intervals. With Google, who knows!

Google does have one thing going for them- their name. Google is an innovative company that has branded itself as the new hightech king of the web. Google has partnerships that will allow the software to evolve quickly and fill in the holes where it's GAPE products are deficit. With their always new and innovative technologies, Google will allow GAPE to go in directions that Microsoft and other companies could only dream of.

The evaluation of a SaaS based framework was definately a good point. To compare apples to apples, organizations can evaluate SaaS products to see if they meet the business needs. A slow approach to the decisionmaking process and evaluating alternatives are a must before investing in a SaaS products. SaaS products can reduce the TCO for an organization by alleviating the headaches of maintenance and upgrades. Access to Googles API's and services like SSO are certainly good features that organizations should consider during the evaluation process.

Overall, an organization really needs to look at it's current infrastructure and business needs to see if Googles GAPE solution would work for them. Google's GAPE has great simple features that would cater to most business users but falls short in the richness and ability to cater to more complex needs and power users.

Wharton Chapter 3 - Technology Speciation

Technology speciation: The evolutionary differentiation of a pre-existing technology into one or more distinct technologies. The chapter discusses how existing technologies evolve to create
"new domain of application".

There are two critical features of speciation:

• "Speciation is not triggered by a transformation of the population within"
• "Speciation event allows the two populations of homogenous entities to grow quite distinct as a result of their now different selection environments"

Changes are not usually a result of revolutionary occurrances in the environment but more of a evolution over time. In the process, the technology is changed to adapt to a new environment. This new environment must have the resources to support the development of this change. As this technology grows, it may displace the older technologies. These new "lineages" of technologies may emerge as a result of combinging or "fusing" other technologies that are then synthesized or "converged". Sometimes, these technologies are not ready for a broad market and are isolated to a single purpose or "island of application".

The key is to find the right context or application for the emerging technology. Some of the key concepts when finding this application is

• view markets as being hetergeneous
• focus on market contexts and not the products that will fit into markets
• expand the criteria for the market as each company and case is different
• study users of the market
• "Learn by doing"
• Accelerate the evolution

There are numerous products that have come on the market that have gone through technology speciation. The PDA was a great technology but was expernsive and really catered to a small percentage of people. As the technology evolved, the PDA became the smartphone and the blackberry. Combining the functions of a mobile phone, calendaring, email, and the web, a new product emerged. Now, the iPhone builds on the the smartphone/blackberry by incorporating more multimedia features and improved use of it's GUI (through a touch screen).

I think the key element of this entire chapter is that new technology rarely just comes about one day. It's an evolution -sometimes slow but sometimes very quick, it just depends on the support structure and the resources of the environment in which it operates.

Gartner Hype Cycle on Emerging Tech 2007

The tera architecture is interesting in that it promises to reduce the cost of computing by 10%. With virtualization emerging in businesses and computing today, I find it hard to believe that it's so far off from now. Leave it up to Google to kick this one off and change the industry! I'm curious as to how this will revolutionize how we do business, the future of application development, and the computing possibilities of the future. More Power!

The 3d printing was an interesting concept. Drawings and schema's can have new life while changing the look and feel of business presentations. The 3d cad and 3d cutting of materials has been around for awhile and I am interested to see if this technology actually catches on. I think 3d modeling using holographics would be more interesting than a 3rd print.

I like gesture recognition and this technology can be seen in Apple's new iPhone. People are becoming more lazy and prefer small, simple movements to perform complex tasks (i.e scrolling with a mouse versus a touchpad on laptop computers). Image if more functions could be performed using other gestures like eye movements, simple movements of the fingers (i.e the tap tap of the finger to double click). The Wii has changed how we play and entertain ourselves.. I'm curious to see how they make games even more interactive for us and how we interact with others.

Web 2.0 -- the changes to the web to make our experience more interactive and more inter-connected have been a wonderful addition to my life. Through the use of collaboration tools for school work, social networks to catch up with old friends, I'm interested to see how this is going to evolve in the future with Web 3.0.

Wharton Chapter 2 - The Pitfalls of Emerging Technology

How do companies avoid the pitfalls of emerging technologies? The first half of the chapter covered the 4 traps a company might encounter with emerging technology.

1. The delayed participation -"watch and wait" theory. Carefully weigh the value of the project before jumping in
2. Sticking with the familiar -dislike of ambiguity and risk averse. If this system works, why change and go down a winding path of uncertainty
3. Reluctance to fully commit - resistance from channel partners, projected low returns from an emerging technology
4. Lack of Persistence - High levels in the company might not recognize the benefit and cut the venture. Emerging tech is known for it's failure rates - an easy target when money is needed

These four traps are very common for businesses to fall into. Emerging technology is ambiguous and contains high levels of uncertainty. For many companies, a wait and see approach allows them to reap the benefits of their competitors mistakes (but also has a chance of losing market share because they do not have the 1st mover advantage). Companies become complacent and enjoy working in comfortable environments. Emerging technology is seldom comfortable because of the levels of risk involved. Comfortability over time can also mean status quo. Companies can be reluctant to commit if the culture does not support the change or if the company is not ready to move in a new direction. Some companies treat emerging tech like poker: know when to hold 'em, some know when to fold 'em. When you fold, you lose your chances of winning the pot. Other companies lack the visionaries that can push and be persistent for emerging technology. A bottom up approach is harder to sell emerging tech than top down.

The second half of the chapter outlined "crafting solutions". Viewing emerging technology with the blinders off allows companies to move in new directions and see new opportunities. These new directions are sometimes hard to see but allow companies to shift in new directions and ways of thinking. How will this emerging tech benefit our customer and does it align with the companies strategic goals? This change when coupled with a learning environment allow for an openness of differing viewpoints within the company to help challenge the mindset and emerging technology projects succeed. When companies challenge the mindset and think outside of the box, companies can begin to experiment to provide new insights and possibilities of the technology. But, companies need to be both flexible and committed (the business paradox of emerging technology) to be successful.

Human Computation

This video was fascinating.. in fact I watched it more than once. I was showing this to some others and I was anxious to create a peekaboom account. I was astounded at the fact about the amount of time people play solitaire around the world (and also players that played ESP for more than 10 hours). I guess I underestimate other peoples time.

The CAPTCHA concept was an interesting segment and I also thought the remarks about "other" industries are using them for spam was very intriguing. I'm curious to see what other games will be created to capture more information about images and tags in the future. Perhaps these games could be marketed to inmates.. they have time to solve these simple problems.

If only we could use human computation to help solve world and economic issues...