The Coming Technology Explosion - Part 1
Written by Ben Bajarin Thursday, 06 August 2009 18:46 Last Updated on Friday, 07 August 2009 06:24
In 2001, my company, Creative Strategies, helped National Semiconductor host a customer conference to communicate National’s strategy and vision. We do something similar for Phoenix Technologies every year. National, at the time, wanted to show how their products and solutions fit with the innovation happening in the industry. Even though much of their innovative silicon was sold off and never used, I took something important away from that conference.
In his kickoff speech, CEO Brian Halla made an interesting point about the technology startup bubble, which had burst and was in the process of disintegrating. He referenced a historical fact that every major industry in the 1900’s went through a similar pattern of growth and decline. He spoke about how the railroad industry had fueled an increase then diminished. Then the same happened with the auto industry and so on. His point was that the burst of that industry’s bubble was always subsequently followed by a bell curve of growth that greatly surpassed the initial bubble. He reasoned that this secondary large industry growth was caused by the crash of the first bubble. He explained that after the first bubble burst, the cost of components became so cheap that entrepreneurs were able to start experimenting and creating all kinds of innovative products. In essence there was a "glut" of components which manufacturers had geared up to meet demand when all of a sudden demand dropped off the table. In his railroad example, the initial decline of the railroad industry made it possible to finally perfect and utilize the frozen railroad car which eventually led to the “meat packing” industry.
The point in his keynote speech was that the startup bubble bursting had the potential to lead to similar innovation where silicon and other important components for infrastructure would become cheap enough so entrepreneurs would experiment and innovate inevitably leading to new markets and technologies. Although we have yet to see the kind of innovation of which he was speaking, I still believe he is correct.
As we survey the current technology landscape and gain insight to a lot of the innovation taking place, we are slowly beginning to see a world where it is feasible to easily pack a lot of processing power into more and more devices affordably. Also important is that it is becoming possible to do so without sacrificing battery life, thus bringing true computing to more and more devices. This opens up all kinds of new doors for hardware, the web, social interaction, visual entertainment experiences and more. Other important component costs like displays, memory, controllers and more are also seeing steep declines in price.
This is why we believe we are on the cusp of a technology explosion that will be driven by a whole new generation of “computing class” silicon powering more and more of our every day electronics.

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