Sloan's Baton: Calling All Users

In the past one hundred years the car and the computer have each taken their turn carrying the tech torch in the relay of human c-changes. However, one major parallel port in this serial overlay has yet to find its general equilibrium. When it comes to cars, the history of the passing of the baton is well documented (hindsight has a way of doing that): Henry Ford standardized production (i.e. supply), while Alfred Sloan standardized the market (i.e. demand). That is, by taking Ford's special theory of 'any color car as long as it's black', and broadening it to include the different wants of the different end users (standardizing the market segments), Sloan came up with a more general theory - AKA General Motors.

In terms of the computer, we still live in the dark ages. Every eighteen months or so a new model is rolled off the assembly line; it's faster, it's more powerful, it has more features, in sum it's just plain Moore. As for the so-called underlying primer of this muscle car, you can install any operating system under the boot that you want, as long as it's Microsoft. Many people criticize Microsoft in this regard. Usually this criticism is couched in big, fancy and often technical words, but what really pisses these diehards off most is simply the company's success. Most potential and actual suitors would gladly assume the role of MS-defendant in a nanosecond.

The baton in question is metaphor for standardization. Establishing a common set of standards is essential to fully leveraging the natural synergies of any market. The problem with this metaphor in terms our current technology is that it remains a one way street. Most geeks and techies have come to believe that standardization is all about the parts and aspirations of frictionless interchangeability; if you build it they will come. Well, if you follow this muscle car logic to its natural conclusion, we'll all be driving cars that can go 0 to 60 GHz in no time flat, but are no longer street legal (practical). Come to think of it, it kind of feels like that already doesn't it? Hot-rods burning rubber and going no where fast. To be sure we are still years away from simply turning our current mix of dirt, gravel, and ash vault into some serious Indy style concrete, but my question comes back to logic, not Ford's, not Moore's, rather Sloan's.

To my way of thinking, what most consumers want first and foremost from technology is reliability. If year after year you had to trade in your car because it took longer and longer to just to start, you'd probably consider taking the bus (or walking). And yet for some strange reason the very same consumer logic has yet to fully amass a comparable critical mass of resistance. No, we've become programmed to believe that it actually makes sense to keep 'upgrading' our computers and software to fix the problem, after all computers don't make mistakes, people do.

At which point it's tempting to be pulled into an acronym slinging vortex of geek-speak, however I encourage you to avoid that bunker in the sand and simply stand up for what you want, what you deserve: less, not Moore. Because until you do there is absolutely, positively no economic incentive for Microsoft or its legions of parasitic cohorts to change, nor is there any incentive for any up-and-coming Generalsofts to enter the fray. Interestingly enough Bill Gates himself stated years ago that one of his favorite books was Alfred Sloan's autobiography, My Years at General Motors. To his credit, Bill Gates is quite unlike Henry Ford; but to his debit, Microsoft is entirely like Ford.

My point is that Alfred Sloan didn't simply try and build a better assembly line than Henry Ford, he took a completely different approach, starting with a superior understanding of the user. Such an utterly basic concept, yet one that is entirely ignored by 9.3782 of 10 techies today. Nothing in this game of one-upmanship will really start to change until consumers plant the soil for change by demanding less, not Moore. The MS-fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our OS, but in our selves; Bill Gates' debit card is being financed by over extending 'our' credit.