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Comment by dlevine | Hacker News Reader

I think that the reason for this is that businesses are very reluctant to adopt revolutionary technologies. They are much more comfortable with technologies that offer a small and defined improvement over what they are using (eg. typewriter to word processor).

If you pitch something completely new, many people will look at you like you are from Mars. My startup's product has the potential to drastically improve the profitability of a lot of businesses. However, when we pitch it for what it is, people tend to react fairly violently, because it runs counter to a lot of their intuitions.

In order to get any traction, we have had to pitch it as an incremental improvement, with the real game changers hidden behind the scenes.

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I think you are right on. This is how fiber optics gained their foothold in the communication space. Coax was reaching its limits in terms of transmission amounts and cost of improvements, but people were skeptical of switching over to an unproven medium due to the many different technologies that had to come together to make it work (fibers, lasers, semiconductors). It took many iterations of fiber technology and many years, starting with "large" graded-index fibers with laser-based repeaters to get to tiny single-mode fibers with optical amplifiers.

I think that the reason for this is that businesses are very reluctant to adopt revolutionary technologies.

It's no surprise that the revolutionary technologies of the internet were developed and deployed by (gasp) the Government. It wasn't until the internet was already well-established that commercial interests started to pay attention.

More academia than government, but mostly on government's money.

Actually, the initial development was done almost entirely by think tanks (Rand Corp., BBN, etc.) and academics, with the crucial piece being supplied by the concept of packet switching, invented by Paul Baran at Rand Corp.

The essence of government is centralization of power over individuals. The essence of the internet is decentralization of communication among individuals.

The internet was a revolutionary invention because it solved a revolutionary problem: how to maintain communications after a massive nuclear attack. Pentagon (DARPA) money was behind most of this because it was the Pentagon that was responsible for solving the problem. More to the point, the key technologies that the internet depended on were the transistor (AT&T/Bell Labs) and the integrated circuit/microprocessor (Intel).

Transistors are an interesting case. AT&T was a government-supported monopoly, allowing it to pursue expensive blue-sky research. And since transistors were expensive, the government purchased 100% of the advanced transistors until they were viable on the market. http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N51/chomsky.html

The New York Times discusses how technology flows from federally-funded research to industry. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/technology/02darpa.html

I agree that national states are centralized institutions, but corporations are another type of hierarchical power structure with their own set of disadvantages.

I think the only way to get businesses to adopt radically new technologies is to start new businesses. This is one advantage small companies/startups have... they can leverage radically new technology as an advantage.

Eventually these new companies become the 'big companies'... but by then they are also hopelessly out of date because processes and tools have become ingrained and can only change incrementally. The cycle begins anew.

They had to do that with Javascript, too.

The semiconductor industry, both in the design and manufacturing processes, has invested substantially in revolutionary technologies for several decades to deliver what is know as Moore's Law.Processes and methodologies in use today are drastically different than what was used even 8-10 years ago.

But profitability is a function of competitive alternatives. Many technologies act like electricity, they dramatically improve productivity without necessarily leading to higher levels of profitability because of adoption by competitors.

"people tend to react fairly violently, because it runs counter to a lot of their intuitions."

When will they ever learn? Wasn't it Thom Watson himself who said the world only needs about five computers? (Sorry, no record can be found.) Or Gates who said 640K is enough RAM for anybody? (Sorry, no record can be found.)

Many great things are counter-intuitive. Like, beating the House in Vegas. But, then, when they react violently, can't you show them a simulation that demonstrates that their intuitions can be beat?

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