Thursday, October 10, 2019

The Next Big Thing Will Have Been Discussed 30 Years Ago

The “next big thing” will have first been talked about roughly 30 years ago, says technologist Greg Satell. IBM coined the term machine learning in 1959, for example.


The S curve describes the way new technologies are adopted. It is related to the product life cycle. Many times, reaping the full benefits of a major new technology can take 20 to 30 years. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, it didn’t arrive on the market until 1945, nearly 20 years later.


Electricity, did not have a measurable impact on the economy until the early 1920s, 40 years after Edison’s plant, it can be argued.


It wasn’t until the late 1990’s, or about 30 years after 1968, that computers had a measurable effect on the US economy, many would note.



source: Wikipedia

The point is that the next big thing will turn out to be an idea first broached decades ago, even if it has not been possible to commercialize that idea.

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