I finally got around to watching that reactionary movie, Seabiscuit, about a man who trades in his automobile for a horse, so to speak, thus transforming him from a driven man of industry into a gentle, pastoral man. Then he and a couple of "losers" team up to turn themselves into winners. It's a nice theme: that in going back to nature one can find the good in oneself, others and the world -- and win a big race at the end too. Regardless of the fact that the movie was based on a true story, in real life you can never go back.
Once things are in motion it's almost impossible to change the course of history, the movement of something. Take for instance typewriters. The QWERTY keyboard we employ doesn't make much sense; or rather, to put it in question form: why is the alphabet all mixed up? Turns out that the first typewriters couldn't keep up with the speed of typist's hands. You had mechanical failure.
To remedy that, one manufacturer mixed up the keys, forcing people to slow down. As chance would have it that became the standard arrangement and companies that began producing better and better machines kept the jumbled up keyboard because everyone had learned to type on that setup. A small circumstance helped to establish the industry standard and played a huge role in the historical development of that industry. A similar story is behind the development of the cars we all drive today. If the breaks had gone the other way, who knows, we might have wound up driving steam-powered vehicles. And a more recent example: maybe we would be watching Beta instead of VHS tapes now had the video market been slightly different (of course, a revolutionary change in video, DVD, is now erasing the tape market, thankfully). In each instance, it may be that the superior technology or method lost out due to small initial conditions at the beginning. It's a disturbing idea, especially when you think about the money you spent on that clunky VHS player and those oversized tapes back in the day.
Re-reading these anecdotes in Michael Waldrop's Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, I began to think of trends within the car audio industry. There are companies that have been at the leading edge of new technologies, but they don't always wind up with the most consumer dollars.
And as consumers we're not always out there to buy the absolute best stuff for various and sometimes confounding reasons. There's the implicit idea that companies that make the best things win in markets based on competition, but that's not always the case. Inferior technologies sometimes dominate the competition. There's not much that any of us really can do that will change the status quo, but we can spend our dollars on future technology wisely. Perhaps it's possible that consumers as a collective can overcome market conditions, create new ones, through their buying power. It'll be interesting for instance to see what happens next in the battle between blue-laser and red-laser DVD players. The DVD Forum, an association of electronics manufacturers, has been in support of the former, which is capable of creating discs that hold five times as more information than the current counterpart. But that just signals the beginning of the battle. Ultimately, it will be decided by consumers. And whether or not a better technology wins out will depend on the information we have and, alas, how much money is in our pockets.
Looking through the Directory I think of how all these products fill a slot. Consumers have different needs at different price points, sure. Certainly, not everything needs to be the most incredible piece of high-tech gear around. My only problem is when something that truly IS the height of technology gets buried by the obscene plethora of cheaper buys that don't even approximate the capabilities of its betters. And we don't need to waste our time and money while we wait for the next revolutionary development...