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Comment by LaundroMat | Hacker News Reader

One innovation that really got adopted throughout the supply chain is the container.

Agreed that it's only part of the supply chain compared to what you describe, but it was a major change that affected a very large amount of processes and businesses.

The scale of things such as worldwide supply chains makes you wonder whether competition is really the right catalyst for efficiency. Cooperation and the setting of standards seems to be a better answer, but of course this leads to a whole lot of different issues.

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> One innovation that really got adopted throughout the supply chain is the container.

If anyone is interested in learning the history of this, a good book (2e: ISBN 978-0-691-17081-7):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

It really took off during/after the Vietnam War as the Pentagon saw its benefits in efficiency and not having to use Old School longshoreman and switching to cranes.

It's amazing that something that seems as obvious and simple as "shipping stuff in a box" is a relatively recent innovation.

Makes me wonder what seemingly obvious thing we're not aware of right now that will be commonplace 50 years from now.

There were always boxes, but I think the real game changer was standardizing the size and other properties of the box, across the planet.

Absolutely - standardisation is the path to ubiquity. From the screw thread to the accidental standard (ISA) of the IBM PC.

It removes many of the barriers to competition and reduces the risk of large players creating monopolies.

I think it’s fair to say that much of what we see in tech is deliberately engineered to avoid standardisation in order to protect competitive advantage.

Wired did an interesting article on standardisation years ago.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.wired.com/2002/01/standar...

Think about railroads and even early highways. It’s hard to standardize before you have a problem.

Containers have big downsides too... but technology allowed costs to be vaporized with containers.

The other big thing is that containers appeared in the US as the railroads entered their death spirals. You can build a dock anywhere and have trucks show up from 100 companies quickly compared to the negotiation required to live railroads. Think about how quickly the NYC maritime business died and moved to New Jersey... that’s a market that represented ~10-15% of the US population at that time.

Eventually we will figure out better protocols for data federation, replacing centralization of digital infrastructure with standardization.

Interestingly, there was an ancient Greek / Roman equivalent: amphora (pottery vases) with bumps that fit into standard cargo racks in ships.

The first picture in the Wikipedia article is what I mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphora .

The container was adopted very fast and very thoroughly throughout worldwide supply chains because it was many, many orders of magnitude better - and allowed a massive reduction in staff.

No proposal for better IT integration in freight comes even close to that level of saving, mostly because the existing chaos is "good enough" and the executives are very, very old and very conservative compared to "digital natives".

And sticking it to the once-fearsome longshormen's union is much more appealing to sticking to yourself and your manager retainers.

It took collaboration to integrate the containers but not necessarily to create it. Creating requires risking resources which is incentivized by the potential monetary gain. Without that potential, it's hard to imagine competitors risking their resources. Another point about collaboration in this case is that it only happened because all parties benefited more. If you don't adopt new things that optimize operations then you'll be left behind by your competitors who are operating more efficiently and have wider support for the customers everyone is competing for.

A closer innovation for supply chain might be the concept of an ASN (although anyone who works in logistics knows how disparate different supplier portals can be...)

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