Three All-time Great Products That Need a Smarter Tech Equivalent
Eric Lundquist | Date: 06-30-09 | Comments: 3
- Three products have endured the test of time. What are their high-tech equals?
What are some truly great,
long-lasting products still in use? I came up with three. The next step was
trying to come up with their equivalents in smarter technology. Hang in there
with me, this is not as crazy as it seems.
1. Bicycles. The modern, two-wheeled safety bicycle (both wheels of equal
size connected by chain drive) was developed in the 1880s.
If you saw one of those early bikes today, you would know how to jump on and
ride. While there have been tremendous technology improvements in materials and
manufacture, the bicycle design remains enduring and—especially these days—the
greenest way to get around.
So what is the high-tech
equal? Something that just works, continues to improve through a worldwide,
loosely organized developer community and will endure? I'm thinking all those Linux-based
desktop, server and mobile operating systems. While any one of the companies
producing those systems could disappear, another will form to take its place.
Is Linux the new bicycle? Looks that way.
2. Books. Books are the key to passing along knowledge. Portable, private
and able to cause a revolution by their contents, it is hard to come up with
something that has had a more profound effect on civilization than books.
The high-tech equal? While
Amazon's Kindle is innovative, you don't get the durability, the ability to
easily pass along the contents or much of an assurance that if someone picks up
a Kindle 100 years from now they will have any hope at reading the contents.
Maybe the next generation of the World Wide Web will finally find the balance
between ubiquity and privacy, real time and archival, and contents that are
understandable by any user regardless of language.
3. The French coffee press. I'm a coffee fan. I've
tried lots of coffee makers that turn on by themselves, drip at specific rates
and so forth. You can't match the French press for something that is designed to serve only one purpose, can be mastered in a
few moments without instruction and does the best job around.
What
is the tech equal? I've been keeping an eye on the mission-specific robotics
industry. You have robots designed for vacuum cleaning, gutter leaf cleaning
and—yes—bomb disposal.
Maybe you'll have a garage full of job-specific robots designed to do one job
really well.
