Broken promises
“Promise” can be defined as an “assurance of future benefit”. It
is a word often heard in association with information technology, although
in that context it means “hope for financial gain”.
Some technologies become part of everyday life while others don't. There
are a lot of technologies that just fail to generate interest among capitalists
because they believe it won't produce a profit.
For example, the US telephone giant Bell released a videophone in the
1960s (a colour version was featured in the late 1960s Stanley Kubrick
film 2001: A Space Odyssey). It failed. Since then, every few years
a telephone company somewhere around the world tries the same idea. So
far, they have all failed.
While it often seems arbitrary whether a technology succeeds or fails,
there are patterns. In general, when a successful new technological product
appears, about half the useful features of the product are introduced after
its initial appearance. This means that a sure sign of failure is a product
that appears, and is repeatedly improved, while no one uses it.
Multi-purpose smart cards are a good example. A smart card is a plastic
card which has a very primitive computer pasted on to it. Its predecessor
is the card you use in a pay phone. Looking at the card, you can see the
gold contacts that allow the phone box to read how much credit you have
available. This card is passive: it just stores some numbers.
Smart cards also calculate, convert, translate, encode and decode, and
do lots of other smart things. It can do lots of different things: paying
for bus fares and phone calls, getting cans of soft drink from a vending
machine, storing personal details, acting as a Medicare card, and lots
more. The technology has existed since the early 1990s in just about a
finished form.
But the product is unacceptable. Apart from the privacy questions it
raised, the most important reason is the competition between card issuers.
No company wants the card to succeed if it is based on a competitor's proposal.
So nearly a decade after its introduction, smart cards are only used in
mobile phones to store user information.
The rule of thumb is, if you hear some marketing hype about a new product,
and you remember hearing the same hype two years ago about an almost identical
product, it's a dead technology. In this case, the promise of profits disappeared
because no one wanted the invention, or it was impossible to use.
Another broken promise is “vaporware” products. These are inventions
that never exist as reliable products. They go straight from idea to the
marketing stage without being developed and implemented. Most often this
is linked to computer software.
In the past couple of years, a new category of broken promise has emerged:
e-commerce (or “e-business” to use IBM's term). Much to the frustration
of the world's largest corporations, no large company makes money from
selling products to consumers over the internet. The exception may be computer
products themselves, but the evidence is clouded by self-interest (the
large computer companies want you to believe that they make lots of money
through e-commerce so that you will buy their products in order to make
money through e-commerce).
Could a rational use of information technology (not dependent on the
markets' requirement of profitability) solve this problem of broken promises?
In some cases no, but in most cases yes, by changing the focus from profitable
to useful. A promising improvement.
BY GREG HARRIS
