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Square Puck

• daniel-cussen 14y ago
  On the subject, important to the business of technology, of skating to where the puck is going, I'd like to add this is as important in the sense of riding waves in the market as it is in the tech sense. You don't want, for instance, to get caught with your pants down by a new technology and become thoroughly obsolete. If, for instance, there were a breakthrough in quantum computers tomorrow and the day after they were widely adopted, any effort you were making on deterministic computers would be worth a lot less. So you don't want to fall behind. What about being too far ahead? Can you get too far ahead? Definitely. You can be ahead of your times, and the only thing you'll get out of it is, thirty years down the line, someone who already liked you will say, "huh. He was ahead of his time." Other than that, you have nothing but incomplete prototypes, inherently false proofs of concept, and possibly, some quaintly cocky marketing. And not a dime. This is all made worse by the pace of technology's advance. It can be fast. It is usually, exponential, when it's not sigmoidal. It can even seem retrograde, like a planet (I'm thinking of the fall of clock-speeds of chips that are adapted to the mobile space--they are "better", technology did "advance," it made mobile computing better than it used to be, but in a sense some other thing moved faster than it did, and it seemed to go backwards.) Where is the sweet spot, not for the tech-savvy businessman, but for the business-savvy technologist? How do you not get fucked by the obsolescence of the old or the incompatibility of the new? Perhaps the best middle ground is founded in mathematics, but how you'd model this is anybody's guess.