day 38

beach blanket babylon 5: the main event

As the sun began to beat on my head and the Bayshore traffic began to build up between me and home, the concert reached the main event. The industry panel allowed real SV people to talk. Amelio and McCracken were the only worthwhile voices, however. Gil Amelio, fresh from his first 100 days at Apple, painted a picture of life in the year 2008. It has computers everywhere. They are in mirrors, cars, houses, roads, telephones, underwear, etc. The future is apparently very bright for Intel. What about Apple? Well, Apple will be doing software - agent software that will be needed to make everything work. Amelio quoted Don Norman, "The most profound technologies are the ones that disappear." Is he talking about Apple? Even though they had heard it all before, the crowd loved it. McCracken was perhaps the most profound. He identified four trends that will define SGI into the future. First, it is a small planet, meaning distance no longer matters. Global competition and the Internet does. Second, experience and seniority no longer matter, but performance does. Managers have to drop the school teacher model, and replace it with the performance athlete model. McCracken calls them "knowledge athletes", and claims they are the drivers of the future. Third, McCracken is suddenly aware of the conversion from industrial age management to information age management, e.g., fast decisions require delegation of responsibility and authority. This forces the organization to pass more information down to the lowest levels of the organization to prevent chaos. Unless your organization can do this, all else is lost. Fourth, for every 100-fold change in technology, expect a paradigm shift. At today's pace, it takes less than a decade to implement a 100-fold change in technology. Expect change every ten years. The Internet is the current technology driving a paradigm shift. In another 10 years something will come along to displace the Internet. I did not stay around for Rich Little. I am sure I missed some valuable insight that only his giant mind possessed, but I found it less painful to get in line at the freeway onramp. While waiting, I jotted this final notion down: After listening to the best minds tell SV how it is, or how it is going to be, I have concluded that nobody is an expert. In reality, SV is whistling in the dark. The entire hi-tech industry simply doesn't know the meaning of life, and never will. Flipping the cover of my Newton MessagePad closed, I veered into the fast lane and got home in time to see Larry King's pre-recorded show.

beach blanket babylon: 1 2 3 4 Daily Dose Index