(2022-08-03) Chin The Shape Of A Technological Window

Cedric Chin: The Shape of a Technological Window. Regard this (extremely opinionated) synthesis piece as a prompt, to prime you to come up with your own set of opinions. (see also (2022-11-29) Chin Technological Windows)

Exploiting a Technological Window is Extremely Difficult

One implicit argument that we’re making in the sequence of cases is that pretty much all of Steve Jobs’s most successful products followed the same template that he’d outlined in 1992.

“These things are hard. They don’t last because it’s convenient or even because it’s economic. They last because they’re really hard, this is hard stuff to do!”

Our original intention with the Macintosh case and iPhone keyboard cases was to demonstrate some of this difficulty. ((2022-08-23) Chin The Iphone Keyboard Make It Or Break It)

More damningly, both the Macintosh project and the iPhone project culminated in scores of engineers burning out.

There’s an interesting corollary to this. Notice how, in the stories of the Macintosh, the iPhone, and the iPod, all of the fundamental technological advancements had already been discovered before Apple started work on their devices.

The iPhone team’s job was to pull these disparate technologies together into a coherent, usable whole

if the company in question were to attempt to also do fundamental research, my bet is that it’s not likely to work.

The second property that Jobs emphasises is the ‘five year realisation, five year exploitation’ property of technological windows

The initial Macintosh was not a big success

The first iPhone famously shipped without third party apps, and without copy and paste

I found it striking that all three products shipped with glaring flaws, and demanded its creators to change positions rapidly in response to market feedback

What might some of the implications of this concept be on your work?

the path to winning in the consumer technology space is to structure your business strategy around the exploitation of technology windows

We highlighted this with the ‘Jobs’s Second Act’ case:

Another implication might be that you’d structure your company to be on the lookout of potential technological windows.

Apple did not have a formal research and development unit per se

research projects flowered in pockets all around the company, many of them without Steve’s blessing or even awareness

Sometimes, on the other hand, he’d concoct a way to combine it with something else he’d seen, or perhaps to twist it in a way to benefit an entirely different project altogether

This was one of his great talents, the ability to synthesize separate developments and technologies into something previously unimaginable. It’s a talent that he would call on to decide what came next.

as I sit here writing this at the end of 2022:

Is the technological window for generative AI open? (bandwagon)

Is the technological window for Virtual Reality open?

Is the technological window for Augmented Reality open?

I think there are obvious caveats to this concept. For instance, Jobs may have built his companies around the exploitation of technological windows, but despite his remarkable track record, even he didn’t have an unblemished history of product successes.

you can now ground these questions in some more specific ones:

the concept is useful, but not foolproof. In the end, the test of a compelling solution is within the market.

Another obvious caveat is that the concept applies most cleanly to consumer electronics

It’s unclear to me that the concept extends to consumer products that are purely software (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok), or even to hybrid consumer products that depend on some combination of software capability and real world coordination (Uber, AirBnB).