Friday, June 3, 2022

Mobile Innovations Often Fail to Arrive as Predicted

Exponential technology change never is matched by exponential human and culture change, which means the use of technology by humans will lag what  the technology enables. As rates of change climb, it is reasonable to assume that what “can be done” will diverge from “what is being done.”


Much of the capability change is driven by Moore's Law and its effect on computing power and cost. 


source: Intel


As computing costs decline, capabilities are embedded where it would not have been commercially possible in the past. That drives innovation. 

  

source: Cadbury Communications 


But humans, organizations and culture do not change at exponential rates. 


So even if we can envision implanted communications, it is unlikely to happen as fast as some predict. 


source: Astro Teller 


In fact, it is normal for developers and hardware designers to be “behind the curve” where it comes to matching product capabilities with technology advances. That is the case for 4G internet of things products, for example. 

source: Embedded Computing 


For such reasons, we commonly see forecasted innovations fail to arrive as early as expected. That will likely be true of implanted communications, as has been the case for other innovations. 


The established trend in mobile communications, for example, has been for product expectations to take a decade or more to achieve commercial adoption. If implanted communications devices are expected to displace phones in less than 10 years, it might take 20 years to happen at scale. 


Some innovations will simply never happen, and others will take 30 years or more to arrive.

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