I’m Sorry Sir, You’re Obsolete
Posted in Uncategorized, silva, application delivery, e-waste, devcentral, infrastructure, technology, humans, obsolete by psilva on August 16th, 2016 Is the rate of obsolescence proportionate to the rate of technologyadvances?
Afew years ago, those little iHome alarm clocksstarted to appear in hotel rooms. Cool gadgets that you could mount your mobilephone to battery charge or play the music on the device. We also had a few in ourhome. They worked perfectly for the iPhone4 since the connector was that 1 inchprotruding plug. When I got the iPhone6, those clocks instantly became useless.Obsolete. At least the phone connector part lost its value.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
The rate of obsolescence. The state when an object,technology, service or practice is no longer needed or wanted…even though itstill may be in good working order. E-waste is the fastestgrowing segment of the waste stream. With the technological advances, notonly are we buying the latest and greatest electronics but we’re also dumpingperfectly good, working devices at silly rates. There was even a story about a CentralPark mugger who rejected a flip phone during a heist.
Sure, the new gadget is shiny, faster, better or does stuff the other onecouldn’t. All commercial things have the typical emerging, growth, maturity anddecline model and I started wondering if the rate of obsolescence isproportionate to the rate of technology advances.
Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law are generally regarded as the bestformulas for predicting how rapidly technology will advance. They offerapproximations of the pace of technological progress. Moore’s Law (1965)describes the rate of improvement in the power of computer chips –essentially, the number of components doubles every 18 months. Generally,the principle can be applied to any technology and says that, depending on thetechnology, the rate of improvement will increase exponentially over time.
Wright’s Law (1936),says that progress increases with experience. Meaning that each percentincrease in cumulative production (in a given industry) results in a fixedpercentage improvement in production efficiency.
A simple web search of ‘rate of technological advancement’returns scores of images that show a huge ramp going up.
But is there the same rapid decline chart for ‘out of date, lostfreshness’ technologies gone by?
Nothing with a laptop falling off a cliff but there are certainly chartsshowing the rate of e-waste.
The climb is not as dramatic as technology advances (yet) but itis still growing rapidly.
So there doesn’t seem to be (or I simply can’t find it) a direct correlationor chart that incorporates both technology advances and resulting obsoleteness.There are plenty of articles that do cover thingsthat will be obsolete in the next few years (DVD players, landlines, clockradios); the jobsthat will be obsolete (travel agent, taxi driver); and the things thatbecame obsoleteover the last decade.
There is a patent, US7949581B2, which describes a method of determining an obsolescence rate of atechnology yet that looks more at the life of a technology patent and itseventual decay and depreciation rate. Less citations over the years means patentdecay. This is more about the depreciation of a specific patent rather than howsociety embraces and then ultimately tosses the technology.
The funny thing is that nowadays vintage items and antiquesseem to be hot markets. Nostalgia is a big seller. Longing for the simplertimes I guess.
And lastly, the rate of WorldIQ over time. Is there a connection with technology?
If you feel your infrastructure is becoming obsolete with all thatcloudy talk, F5 cancertainly help by providing the critical application delivery servicesconsistently across all your data centers - private clouds, publicclouds, and hybrid deployments - so you can enjoy the same availability,security and performance you've come to expect.
ps
Related:
- How to predict the progress of technology
- The Future is Coming Much Faster Than we Think, Here’s Why
- Quickly Obsolete
- Method of determining an obsolescence rate of a technology US 7949581 B2
- Technolithic Fossils
E-waste image courtesy: www.slideshare.net/SuharshHarsha
World IQ image courtesy: http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/BRBAKER/
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