Paul McNamara has put together a set of incredibly well-researched and thought-provoking posts on how technology adoption occurs within businesses, and does a helluva persuasive job challenging some of the legends and lore that have built up over the past couple of decades (example: Why did the PC win the enterprise in the early 80’s? “The spreadsheet,” you say? Wrong.). Here are a few excerpts; I encourage you to check out the whole series. (n.b. If you got value out of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, you’ll likely learn a thing or two from Paul’s series as well.)
“Shifts in technology use in the business world often happen like earthquakes. At first, they are felt suddenly, like a p-wave. After the technology p-wave, things continue to shake in the industry — often for several years — like an s-wave. But it’s what happens during the p-wave that can determine winners and losers.”
Part 2: The PC Revolution and the Forgotten Killer App
“Conventional wisdom holds that the spreadsheet (Visicalc for Apple and Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC) was the killer app that got PCs into big companies. It’s true that lots of PCs got sold into the Financial Services sector because of the spreadsheet. But this explanation is somewhat incomplete. Outside of the Financial Services sector, a less recognized force was also at work. A small spark had ignited big sales of PCs to Fortune 500 businesses: it was the introduction of the lowly 3270 emulator.”
Part 3: Linux Displaces Unix and the Myth of the Basement Hacker
“The Linux p-wave hit in 1998/1999. It wasn’t until halfway through the p-wave that we even realized what was going on. The way we found out was a story in itself. Our engineers had put a signature deep inside the OS that enabled a web-server to respond to a network query by saying “I’m an Apache web server that is running on Red Hat Linux”. Mike Prettejohn had formed a business called Netcraft which routinely pinged millions of web servers to gather statistics about the Internet and had figured out a way to read these signatures. Mike called me in late 1998 and said, ‘are you guys aware that Red Hat is about to overtake Microsoft in the number of web servers on the Internet?‘”
Part 4: Technology P-Waves — Jolts to the Market
“I’ve described how earthquakes happen in two phases — the p-wave (a short powerful impulse) and the s-wave (the sustained shaking). In reality, the p-wave and the s-wave emanate from the same spot. The reason we experience them as two different events is because they travel at different speeds. The p-wave travels much faster than the s-wave. How far you are from the epicenter will determine the time interval between when you experience the p-wave and when you experience the s-wave.
A technology shift happens the same way. The p-wave of a technology shift is characterized by large numbers of smaller-scale decision makers (individual contributors and first line managers) nearly simultaneously deciding to adopt a new approach. The technology p-wave travels fast because biz-sumers decide and act faster than larger-scale decision makers. They are closer to the problem and their decisions carry less risk.”
Part 5: Software Simplified — The Next Technology P-wave
“The truth is that if you talk to just about anyone on the front lines today, whether they are in sales, finance, manufacturing, marketing, or any other operating group, you find remarkable similarity in the stories they tell. They all feel like they’re not getting the applications they need to do their job well…If you talk to the IT guys, they are also frustrated. Deep down they understand the needs of their internal customers, but they simply don’t have the time or the budget to respond.
These are exactly the conditions that are ripe for a p-wave shift. And new generations of Web-Service approaches are exactly the right kind of solutions to start the cascade.”
I’m still wrapping my head around the whole thing, and I really like the metaphor of different types and speeds of adoption happening in parallel, via the p-wave and s-wave analogies. Good stuff, Paul.
(disclosure: coghead is a client)