Picking a Winner

One of the things that has often fascinated me is the way in which given kinds of technologies (and fads in general) spread throughout a population, a metric that I have often used as a way of gauging which technologies have potentially long staying power. This holds more than academic interest for me - as a writer of books, I often am trying to find those ideas, those memes, that will likely end up being popular enough that I can sell many copies of a book by the time it gets to market. Even if you are a writer of fiction, being able to spot these trends gives you a chance to get a book to market with a topic that's getting "hot", and also helps you to determine when a technology is "oversold" and consequently may be in danger of sitting on the shelves.

To that extent, I thought I'd dedicate my column today to a loose set of "rules" (observations really) that I use in looking into my crystal ball. Admittedly, what works for me not work for you, but I think most of these are pretty much common sense.

1. Open Standards Trump Closed Ones. Standards provide more than "playground principles" for getting people to play in a consistent manner - they also provide a way for smaller players to both avoid a lot of the conceptual research necessary to best describe a given technology, as well as insure that their product will have a market for what it produces. As standards typically form the basis for the way a given set of intellectual property evolves, open standards can also head off potential legal battles down the road.
   
   
2. Dead Tech Reincarnates in Software. Remember the drubbings that push channels, network computers, Hypercard, animated agents, and so forth received as they were pummelled into oblivion. Push lives on in spirit as Atom (nee RSS), network computers have morphed into cell phones and Blackberries, andHypercard was one of the big driving force behind the World Wide Web. If I was a betting man (and I am) I would wager that animated agents will come back into play very shortly as well via XML driven intelligent interfaces.
   
   One of the things that causes a technology to fail is that the technology becomes used first as a vehicle for promoting advertisements. Often the ideas themselves were pretty good (channels for instance), but because channels very quickly became associated with companies piping their ads to your inwilling desktop, push marketing became a term of loathing for most people. However, when people went back and looked at what made the technology possible (in this case the syndication offered by RSS) they often find novel uses for it, such as Weblogs. I keep an eye on any number of failed ideas and try to figure out whether the failure was due to the concept or to its execution, and if it looks like the latter, I'll put out a watch on the web and elsewhere to see if the core tech is showing back up.
   
   
3. Watch the Novice Developers. In the early 1990s, Microsoft came up with an exceptionally innovative product called Visual Basic. It combined an easy to use computer language with the ability to create native applications quickly in its core Windows operating system. Up until that time, Windows was not quite a slam dunk - it was fragile, was competing with other graphical interfaces (such as the Macintosh) and had a relatively small developer base made up of mid-level programmers working within C++. With VB, however, a whole new cohort of power users joined the ranks of "programmers" and there was a huge surge in the development community. Microsoft benefitted by this because it meant that they had, seemingly overnight, a whole forest of applications being developed for it, which of course strengthened the attraction to using this particular OS.
   
   However, starting in about 1997, several things changed. Microsoft shifted their focus away from the development community and toward the higher level IT managers, most of whom did not interact with the systems day to day. In the short term, this strategy paid off, as it sold more higher end server boxes. In the long term, though, Microsoft may have eaten its seed corn. Linux and the BSDs began to jump into prominence, and Java (and later XML) made it easier for developers to migrate off of the Microsoft ship. Suddenly, people were porting away from Microsoft in record numbers, driven mostly by the next cadre of young developers who cut their teeth on these new quasi-Unix systems.
   
   Young developers create software, and the most innovative software usually does not start in the boardroom but in the garage office. To see what things will be hot tomorrow, look at what the most common apps in beta are at Sourceforge or Fresh Meat. Chances are that the applications being development there by themselves will not be the ones that are hot, but applications like those probably will be.
   
   
4. Ignore the Natterings of the Press. I've worked for a number of tech magazines. They live and die off advertising. The mainstream tech reporters know that market well, and expend huge amounts of ink on the doings of Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Hewlet-Packard, Oracle, and so forth. These companies strip whole forests bare to get press releases out to the magazines, and the magazines oblige by writing good reviews about products in hopes of getting advertising money. Some are more objective about the news than others, but given tight deadlines and constrained budgets, the jump from press release to article is usually not far. As press releases are essentially advertisements indicating that a given product has reached (or is nearing) completion, it means that someone there must have been at least a year ahead of you at that stage.
   
   By the time it hits eWeek, information about trends is stale -- more or less. If you are in investor looking at getting into a given technology in the market, the magazines can give you a pretty good idea about what is beginning to bubble to the surface, but if you are a developer looking to catch the next big wave, or a writer looking to get his book pulblished in time for the market to take off, then you're probably late for the party once it makes the headlines.
   
   
5. Solutions in Search of Problems. One of the central questions I always have about a given technology is whether it is fufills an obvious need or whether it is a solution in search of a problem. "I need to make lots of money by selling this software" is not a "problem," though I am sometimes astonished at how many otherwise sane people believe otherwise. Visual Basic made it possible for people who otherwise didn't know the first thing about programming to write serviceable programs. In more contemporary terms, SVG is beginning to take off not because it has any immediate demonstrable impact in presentation graphics (ala Flash or Powerpoint) but because it makes intelligent graphics such as self-aware maps possible, and as people become more conversant with it, they are adapting it for other things.
   
   When evaluating a technology, the first thing you must ask is "How will this help me?" If, after some time spent looking at it you cannot formulate several different one paragraph answers, then the technology is not worth you investing your time on it. I will typically role play different potential users when looking at something new, and I figure if I can't see any obvious advantages in that role play session, then most other people won't either.
   
   
6. Coolness is a factor. There have been a few technologies that I've looked at and immediately responded, "That's cool!" This isn't necessarily due to eye candy - if it makes it possible for you to conceive of things that you absolutely want to do with it right now, even if it isn't quite ready for prime time yet, then you've stumbled on something that will likely be huge down the road. Additionally, this does not necesssarily have to be within the realm of computer technology; I read science and technology magazines extensively, looking not necessarily for what the latest gadgets or ideas are, but instead looking at what things a given innovation (say Bayesian computing) could open up down the road.
   
   
7. Know Your Own Limitations. I've worked with web technologies for eleven years, and XML technologies for eight. I know these areas very well, especially in the context of user interfaces. I know less about databases, though I have worked with them sporadically over the last several years, and I specifically disavow domain knowledge there. This is not to say that you should not try to learn as much about technologies that touch on your own area of expertise as possible (that's the way you learn more, after all) but you should put a confidence factor into any assessment you make based upon how far it is from your core competencies.
   
   
8. Watch the Edges. The most significant innovations do not occur well within the established body of a given area of knowledge. They occur at the boundaries between two otherwise disparate fields. Most new technologies come from people realizing that an often well established solution or methodology in one field can be adapted for use in a different one. Often that technology is a "bridge" a means of translating core concepts back and forth between the two domains -- such as the use of Analog to Digital to Analog subsytems used in modern car engines that originally had their foundation in sampling music. To that extent, seeing the metaphorical similarities between two systems can often let you apply expensively funded innovation in one area to work much less expensively in others.
   
   
9. Think Systemically. Progress is not linear. It branches and weaves, ebbs and flows, sometimes appearing to stagnate and then get a sudden burst of energy to seemingly come out of nowhere. When one particular technology (or company) dominates, it usually ends up creating back-pressure specific to that technology. In the absence of other factors, these usually balance out, but eventually some change in the technological environment will cause the two dominant technologies to shift with dizzying speeds. As a realpolitik example of this, several countries in the former Warsaw pact have undergone significant improvements over the years, making them competitive in a manner well outside of their relative population side. They've leaped ahead of much larger economies in areas such as telecommunication because they effectively found it more cost effective to scrap decades old infrastructure and start from scratch, gaining the advantage of new technologies without having to spend the time and money needed to develop the intervening stages. Look for factors like this when deciding where a break-out company may come from.
   
   
10. Take Time to Think. In our go-go world, there is a tendency to feel that if you are not at your desk ten hours a day, six days a week, then you are failing (and may even be considered a thief for taking money for work during those unoccupied moments.). Yet I find that by setting aside a period of an hour or so a day for "research", finding out about new technologies, working through patterns, doing something besides sitting and coding, you will generally be able to create better code with more applicability, will be able to better foresee the requirements that you will have, and maybe even be able to see ways around particularly thorny problems. Most of my best insights came to me while I was "taking a break" in this manner.
    
    I've long suspected that many of the problems that plague us today stem from a lack of reflection on the part of others in the past. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just turn off the TV, shut down the radio, and go take a walk.

I'd be interested in hearing about things that you do to help you "see the future". Until next time, enjoy!

-- Kurt Cagle