A Techonomic Perspective of History

In 1986, I started a small technology company called TeleRobotics International,
Inc. I had recently left a national laboratory to start on a journey with an unknown
destination. In hindsight, it is amazing to consider how many of today’s common
business technologies we did not have then.

We did not have a cell phone. We did not have a fax machine. We did not have
a Web site. We did not have a local area network. We did not use e-mail. We did
not have an inkjet printer. We did not have a CD or CD reader, burner, or player,
much less a DVD. We did not have a color computer display because we did not
have a color computer. Overseas telephone calls were measured in dollars per minute,
not cents per minute. We did have a hard drive — bigger than a breadbox and holding
all of 10 megabytes! And we invested in a used laser printer costing more than the
rest of our office equipment and computers combined.

It was not that we were too small and too poor to obtain these things. Well,
actually we were too small and poor, but the main reason we did not have those
devices is because they were not widely available. All of those commerce-supporting
technologies were either invented, perfected for mass use, or cost reduced for wide
distribution in the past 20 years.

From the perspective of eternity, 20 years is a very
short time. From the perspective of business, 20 years is an eternity.
Reread the list of “did not haves” and think about your daily business endeavors. Your organization would be noncompetitive if all these devices were removed from your office.
In fact, you might be behind if only one of them was removed from your business
today!