Turning Technology into Fortune Jyoti Tandukar

The PC Thomas J. Watson, Sr., the founder of IBM, proclaimed that the world-wide demand for data processing computers would come to fewer than fifty machines. "We are already meeting our needs with large machine", the conventional thinking went, "so why would we need small ones?"

The answer, as we see now, was that the great power of PCs did not lie in doing what larger machines already did but in giving birth to entirely new classes of applications.

Telephone and Radio A lack of deductive thinking about technology is not a new problem, nor one confined to laypeople. Early on, many people thought that the greatest potential for the telephone lay in reducing the loneliness of the farmer's wife.

Telephone and Radio Thomas Edison once said he thought the value of the phonograph, which he invented, was its capability to allow "dying gentlemen" to record their last wishes.

Telephone and Radio Marconi, the developer of the radio, viewed it as a wireless telegraph that would operate point-to-point; he didn't recognize its potential as a broadcast medium.

Photocopier The real power of xerography was completely missed by no less a company than IBM. In the late 1950s, when Xerox was performing the basic research on the 914, its first commercial copying machine, the company was hard pressed for money and wanted to cash out of the project. It offered its patents to IBM.

Photocopier IBM hired Arthur D Little (ADL) to do a market research study. ADL concluded that even if the revolutionary machine captured 100 percent of the market for carbon paper, dittograph, and hectograph – the techniques used for copying documents at the time – it still would not repay the investment required to get into the copier business.

Photocopier … … We know now – indeed, it seems obvious – that the power of the Xerox copier did not lie in its capability to replace carbon paper and other existing copying technologies, but in its ability to perform services beyond the reach of these technologies.

Photocopier … … The 914 created a market for convenience copies that had previously not existed. Thirty copies of an existing document to share with a group or coworkers was not a need people knew they had before the invention of xerography. Since people couldn't make thirty copies easily and inexpensively, no one articulated doing so as a "need".

Walkman Realizing that people are unable to conceptualize what they do not know, Sony gave the Walkman the green light based on developers' insights into people's needs and the capabilities of technology. The Walkman transformed people's idea about where and how they could listen to music.

The Internet Until few years back, Internet was taken as a means to exchange messages and share research information. Nobody at that time had thought that it would become a basic infrastructure just as electricity for doing business.

Lesson to Learn Breakthrough technology makes feasible activities and actions of which people have not yet dreamed. The challenge that most corporations fail to meet is recognizing the business possibilities that lie latent in technology.