One is an illustrated history of a character's tendency to embrace the wrong technology, be it a Betamax or a miracle cheese grater.
Don't get me wrong, technology can be a wonderful thing.
Hoping to build the camera for the telescope, he bet on the wrong technology and lost out to a pair of California Institute of Technology gadgeteers, James A. Westphal and James Gunn, who is now at Princeton.
Whatever the reason, by adopting the wrong technology, they handed the incumbent telephone companies a legitimate excuse for dragging their feet and thereby sealed their own fate.After some noisy disagreement, the prevailing view of our online forum on the topic was that too many of the newcomers were literally that: newcomers, with little real telecoms experience.
While this strategy minimizes the risk of choosing the "wrong" technology, it tends also to come at a higher investment cost.
Pick the wrong technology, fail to use it properly, let a competitor get an edge, and your company is in trouble and your career is in ruins.
A handful of "hot" companies seem poised to control the market for communications "infrastructure" forever, only to be brought down by betting on the wrong technology -- as Lucent did by emphasizing an optical format that did not become the industry's favorite -- or taking other strategic missteps.
Against that, there's the argument that, if we were to limit the initial investment to extended pilots, we'd reduce the risk of either overinvesting public money (at a time like this!) or investing in what turns out to be the wrong technology.
"It's called hiring the wrong technology vendor to build the first site," he said.
In my Aug. 27 column, I credited the wrong technology company for the first commercial use of the mouse.
