Technology – Page 30 – artdiamondblog.com

With iTunes, Apple Leapfrogged CD Burners (a Boat Apple Had Missed)

Is the example sketched below, and in a previous entry, a case of a first mover disadvantage? Or is it simply a case of a lucky or wise bounce-back from a genuine mistake?

(p. 382) . . . [Job’s] angry insistence that the iMac get rid of its tray disk drive and use instead a more elegant slot drive meant that it could not include the first CD burners, which were initially made for the tray format. “We kind of missed the boat on that,” he recalled. “So we needed to catch up real fast.” The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis and bracketed “Job’s” added.)

Apple “Finding a Way to Leapfrog Over Its Competitors”

Isaacson says Jobs wanted two refinements in the iMac. One was new colors. The other is discussed below.
I am not sure what to make of this episode. Is Isaacson suggesting that it was good for Apple that Jobs made a mistake on the type of CD hardware to put in the iMac? That this added constraint “would then force Apple to be imaginative and bold”?
Or is the moral that good people who make a lot of quick decisions, make mistakes, sometimes big mistakes, and that Jobs found a way to bounce back from this one?

(p. 356) There was one other important refinement that Jobs wanted for the iMac: getting rid of that detested CD tray. “I’d seen a slot-load drive on a very high-end Sony stereo,” he said, “so I went to the drive manufacturers and got them to do a slot-load drive for us for the version of the iMac we did nine months later.” Rubinstein tried to argue him out of the change. He predicted that new drives would come along that could burn music onto CDs rather than merely play them, and they would be available in tray form before they were made to work in slots. “If you go to slots, you will always be behind on the technology,” Rubinstein argued.

“I don’t care, that’s what I want,” Jobs snapped back. They were having lunch at a sushi bar in San Francisco, and Jobs insisted that they continue the conversation over a walk. “I want you to do the slot-load drive for me as a personal favor,” Jobs asked. Rubinstein agreed, of course, but he turned out to be right. Panasonic came out with a CD drive that could rip and burn music, and it was available first for computers that had old-fashioned tray loaders. The effects of this (p. 357) would ripple over the next few years: It would cause Apple to be slow in catering to users who wanted to rip and burn their own music, but that would then force
Apple to be imaginative and bold in finding a way to leapfrog over its competitors when Jobs finally realized that he had to get into the music market.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

“People Said He Was a Fraud, But He Turned Out to Be Right”

“Willis Whitfield with a mobile clean room in the 1960s.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B16) Half a century ago, as a rapidly changing world sought increasingly smaller mechanical and electrical components and more sanitary hospital conditions, one of the biggest obstacles to progress was air, and the dust and germs it contains.
. . .
Then, in 1962, Willis Whitfield invented the clean room.
“People said he was a fraud,” recalled Gilbert V. Herrera, the director of microsystems science and technology at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. “But he turned out to be right.”
. . .
His clean rooms blew air in from the ceiling and sucked it out from the floor. Filters scrubbed the air before it entered the room. Gravity helped particles exit. It might not seem like a complicated concept, but no one had tried it before. The process could completely replace the air in the room 10 times a minute.
Particle detectors in Mr. Whitfield’s clean rooms started showing numbers so low — a thousand times lower than other methods — that some people did not believe the readings, or Mr. Whitfield. He was questioned so much that he began understating the efficiency of his method to keep from shocking people.
“I think Whitfield’s wrong,” a scientist from Bell Labs finally said at a conference where Mr. Whitfield spoke. “It’s actually 10 times better than he’s saying.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM YARDLEY. “W. Whitfield, 92, Dies; Built Clean Room.” The New York Times (Weds., December 5, 2012): B16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date December 4, 2012, and has the title “Willis Whitfield, Inventor of Clean Room That Purges Tiny Particles, Dies at 92.”)

“The Arpanet Was Not an Internet”

“Xerox PARC headquarters.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”
. . .
Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: “The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.”
If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.
But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.
According to a book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning” (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. “We have a more immediate problem than they do,” Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. “We have more networks than they do.” Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers “were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with.”

For the full commentary, see:
Gordon Crovitz. “INFORMATION AGE; Who Really Invented the Internet?” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 23, 2012): A11.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis internal to last paragraph was in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 22, 2012.)

I read the Hiltzik book several years ago, and my memory of it is not sharp, but I remember thinking that it was a useful book:
Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperBusiness, 1999.

Poor People Want Washing Machines

The wonderful clip above is from Hans Rosling’s TED talk entitled “The Magic Washing Machine.”
He clearly and strongly presents his central message that the washing machine has made life better.

What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. With newly designed graphics from Gapminder, Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading.

Source of video clip summary:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html

The version of the clip above is embedded from YouTube, where it was posted by TED: http://youtu.be/BZoKfap4g4w

It can also be viewed at the TED web site at:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html

(Note: I am grateful to Robin Kratina for telling me about Rosling’s TED talk,)
(Note: I do not agree with Rosling’s acceptance of the politically correct consensus view that the response to global warning should mainly be mitigation and green energy—to the extent that a response turns out to be necessary, I mainly support adaptation, as suggested in many previous entries on this blog.)

“Did Alexander Graham Bell Do Any Market Research Before He Invented the Telephone?”

(p. 170) After the Macintosh team returned to Bandley 3 that afternoon, a truck pulled into the parking lot and Jobs had them all gather next to it. Inside were a hundred new Macintosh computers, each personalized with a plaque. “Steve presented them one at a time to each team member, with a handshake and a smile, as the rest of us stood around cheering,” Hertzfeld recalled. It had been a grueling ride, and many egos had been bruised by Jobs’s obnoxious and rough management style. But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor anyone else at the company could have pulled off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it likely have emerged from focus groups and committees. On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: italics in original.)

With Scorned Ideas, and Without College, Inventor and Entrepreneur “Ovshinsky Prevailed”

“Stanford R. Ovshinsky and Iris M. Ovshinsky founded Energy Conversion Laboratories in 1960.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. A23) Stanford R. Ovshinsky, an iconoclastic, largely self-taught and commercially successful scientist who invented the nickel-metal hydride battery and contributed to the development of a host of devices, including solar energy panels, flat-panel displays and rewritable compact discs, died on Wednesday [October 17, 2012] at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He was 89.
. . .
His ideas drew only scorn and skepticism at first. He was an unknown inventor with unconventional ideas, a man without a college education who made his living designing automation equipment for the automobile industry in Detroit, far from the hotbeds of electronics research like Silicon Valley and Boston.
But Mr. Ovshinsky prevailed. Industry eventually credited him for the principle that small quantities or thin films of amorphous materials exposed to a charge can instantly reorganize their structures into semicrystalline forms capable of carrying significant current.
. . .
In 1960, he and his second wife, the former Iris L. Miroy, founded Energy Conversion Laboratories in Rochester Hills, Mich., to develop practical products from the discovery. It was renamed Energy Conversion Devices four years later.
Energy Conversion Devices and its subsidiaries, spinoff companies and licensees began translating Mr. Ovshinsky’s insights into mechanical, electronic and energy devices, among them solar-powered calculators. His nickel-metal battery is used to power hybrid cars and portable electronics, among other things.
He holds patents relating to rewritable optical discs, flat-panel displays and electronic-memory technology. His thin-film solar cells are produced in sheets “by the mile,” as he once put it.
. . .
“His incredible curiosity and unbelievable ability to learn sets him apart,” Hellmut T. Fritzsche, a longtime friend and consultant, said in an interview in 2005.

For the full obituary, see:
BARNABY J. FEDER. “Stanford R. Ovshinsky Dies at 89, a Self-Taught Maverick in Electronics.” The New York Times (Fri., October 19, 2012): A23.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated October 18, 2012.)
(Note: in the first sentence of the print version, “hybrid” was used instead of the correct “hydride.”)

Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” Tells Us Much About the Innovative Project Entrepreneur

Source of book image: http://www.internetmonk.com/wp-content/uploads/walter-isaacson-steve-jobs1.png

Steve Jobs is one of my favorite examples of what I call the “project entrepreneur.” Walter Isaacson has written a fascinating biography of Jobs, full of memorable examples for any student of the innovative entrepreneur.
During the next few weeks, I will occasionally add entries that quote some of the more important or thought-provoking passages.

The book under review is:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Personal DNA Data, Smart Phones, and the Social Network Can Democratize Medicine

(p. 236) With the personal montage of your DNA, your cell phone, your social network—aggregated with your lifelong health information and physiological and anatomic data—you are positioned to reboot the future of medicine. Who could possibly be more interested and more vested in your data? For the first time, the medical world is getting democratized. Think of the priests before the Gutenberg printing press. Now, nearly six hundred years later, think of physicians and the creative destruction of medicine.

Source:
Topol, Eric. The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

American Innovators Created Synergies and Interchangeable Parts

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) . . . the post-Civil War industrialization had an important and largely overlooked predecessor in the first decades of the 19th century, when, as Charles Morris writes in “The Dawn of Innovation,” “the American penchant for mechanized, large-scale production spread throughout industry, presaging the world’s first mass-consumption economy.” It is a story well worth telling, and Mr. Morris tells it well.
. . .
Whole industries sprang up as the country’s population boomed and spilled over into the Middle West. The rich agricultural lands there produced huge surpluses of grain and meat, especially pork. The city of Cincinnati–whose population grew to 160,000 in 1860, from 2,500 in 1810–became known as “Porkopolis” because of the number of hogs its slaughterhouses processed annually.
Mr. Morris does a particularly good job of explaining the crucial importance of synergy in economic development, how one development leads to another and to increased growth. The lard (or pig fat) from the slaughterhouses, he notes, served as the basis for the country’s first chemical industry. Lard had always been used for more than pie crust and frying. It was a principal ingredient in soap, which farm wives made themselves, a disagreeable and even dangerous task thanks to the lye used in the process.
But when lard processing was industrialized to make soap, it led to an array of byproducts such as glycerin, used in tanning and in pharmaceuticals. Stearine, another byproduct, made superior candles. Just in the decade from the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s, Cincinnati soap exports increased 20-fold, as did the export of other lard-based products. Procter & Gamble, founded in Cincinnati in 1837 by an Irish soap maker and an English candle maker who had married sisters, grew into a giant company as the fast-rising middle class sought gentility.
Mr. Morris goes into great detail on the development of interchangeable parts–the system of making the components of a manufactured product so nearly identical that they can be easily substituted and replaced.

For the full review, see:
John Steele Gordon. “BOOKSHELF; The Days Of Porkopolis.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., November 20, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was updated November 19, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2012.

Race Car Flywheels Save Fuel

“FLYWHEEL; Using a flywheel system from Williams Hybrid Power. Audi’s R18 e-tron quattro car became the first hybrid vehicle to win the iconic 24 Hours of Le Mans race.” Source of caption: print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: http://www.williamshybridpower.com/#%2Ftechnology%2Fthe_flywheel

NASA costs are often justified by giving cases where innovations from space spillover into the consumer economy. But in the normal market economy, there are alternative sources of innovation that would spillover into the consumer economy, without taking taxpayer dollars. I wonder if anyone has ever studied how often race car innovations make their way into mainstream production cars?

(p. B4) European auto makers might turn to an unlikely source to reduce fuel consumption and pollution: gas-guzzling Formula One race cars.

Rotating mechanical devices called flywheels developed for these speed machines could make everyday cars more powerful and efficient.
. . .
Flywheels have been around since the Industrial Revolution, when they were widely used in steam engines. Mounted on a crankshaft, these spinning discs provide a steady flow of energy when the energy source isn’t constant, as is the case with piston-driven engines in cars.
Flywheels can range from about a meter in diameter to less than three centimeters, depending on the amount of energy required. The larger and heavier the flywheel is, the more inertial energy it delivers when spinning.
In miniature form, they show up in friction toy cars that are driven by a flywheel and speed up when the toy is rolled quickly across a surface. When the car is let go, it is the flywheel that speeds the car across the floor.
Until recently, flywheels–known in the auto industry as kinetic energy recovery systems, or KERS–have been too heavy or too bulky to use on road vehicles. But that is changing, thanks to new, lighter materials, high-tech engineering and power-management systems.

For the full story, see:
DAVID PEARSON. “NEXT IN TECH; An Unlikely Fuel Saver: Racing Cars; To Reduce Pollution, Auto Makers Experiment With Flywheels Developed for Formula One Motors.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., August 21, 2012): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was updated August 22, 2012.)