Hardware Obsolescence
10 January 2005
This article was originally published in Ancestry
Magazine. When they put a version on the web, I'll post a link
-Beau 8 January 2006
For your consideration, I submit the following:
ITEM. My brother is an old school genealogist. He
writes to county clerks asking if they have records with the name he wants, then
he writes back to request the records. In the mail. The kind with a stamp and an
envelope and a dog-delicacy deliveryman. He drives to the Clayton Library and
uses a pencil to make notes about indexes that he reads in paper books. He knows
computers, he’s not a Luddite. He’s just comfortable doing things that way.
ITEM. My friend Bob, since retired, used to own a
women’s clothing store. He bought an IBM PC XT when it was expensive, the state
of the art. He was still using it in his business ten years later. He was the
last person I knew who was using one (and the only one I know that paid for
SmartCom software). Bob was familiar with the fact that as long as a computer
will turn on, it will continue to do whatever it did the day it came in the
door.
ITEM. I recently received the following email.
“Greetings to you in the name of the most high God, from my beloved country
Nigeria. I am sorry and I solicit your permission into your privacy. I am
Barrister William Afume, lawyer to the late Dr Ndugu Abacus, a brilliant
Nigerian mathematician.
My former client, late Dr Ndugu Abacus, died in a mysterious plane crash in the
year 1999 on the way to a scientific conference to make an announcement of the
utmost importance to mankind.
He was planning to present a paper regarding his extensive work on hardware
obsolescence. It is said the product obsolescence methodology he had developed,
would be roughly ten times more successful compared to the latest Microsoft
techniques. The plan was contained in a leather case, and stored on a privately
owned island close to the coast of Nigeria. Dr Ndugu Abacus is also the King of
the local tribe by heritage...”
ITEM. I have a Hewlett Packard Scanjet IIp. It’s a
black and white scanner with a very nice sheet feeder attached. I’ve had it
longer than Bob kept his XT. I haven’t used it in a while. It
requires a SCSI connector (SCSI, pronounced “scuzzy,” is an acronym for “small
computer system interface”). The SCSI connector requires an XP compatible
driver. The driver requires an old dos-type memory resident program, which has
to be loaded at startup. It doesn’t run reliably on my last two computers, and I
suspect it’s that the operating system, the drivers, the SCSI adapter card
and its driver don’t all communicate with the application they way they did
when it was last updated, in the early 90’s.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten 1992. An article
by Robert A Mamis, published in Inc Magazine in June of that year, said:
“First it was a mouse, then color, then CD-ROM. Now it's a scanner that
the well-equipped system has to acquire … HP ScanJet IIp for Macintosh is
$1,095; for PC and Micro Channel systems, $1,295.” Lest you think I was ever
closely associated with that kind of swag, I want to say that I paid less than
half that for mine. Did he say “Micro Channel?”
GET TO THE POINT
What does all of this have to do with hardware
obsolescence? Basically, everything. Hardware obsolescence means that a thing is
no longer usable. It’s not the same thing as wearing out – that’s deterioration.
An obsolete thing is still capable of performing its original function, but
there is a barrier to its continued use for that purpose. This column is a
discussion of those barriers that prevent the continued use of computer hardware
by genealogists.
Those barriers include:
Technological development. It is disruptive. New materials,
smaller circuits, improvements and materials and order management all help make
the next one better, cheaper, and faster. This is a very powerful force, because
it creates awareness on the part of manufacturers that building a computer
product to last 20 years is folly. It’s complicated by the interaction between
the layers of hardware, application software, operating systems, driver
programs, and networks that make up the current futuristic computing
environment.
The known short product life leads to “value engineering.” That’s
what makes it break the day after the warranty runs out. Value engineers go home
at night and dream of devices with components that all disintegrate to ashes at
the same instant and then fall into the nearest wastebasket. If any recognizable
parts remain, the value engineer is having a bad dream.
Computer use takes place in networks, which create external
effects that have an impact on the long term value of a product. These are
called “network effects.” I mean networks of people, but networks of connections
like the internet help to create bigger networks of people. For example, eBay is
more valuable if a lot of people are buying. It attracts more sellers, which
attracts more buyers. The value of participation on eBay is greater today than
it was in September of 1995, when the business was founded. You might have a
perfectly good word processor, or spreadsheet, or floppy drive, but if your
friends and family have a different one, yours is possibly obsolete. This was a
prevalent part of the dot-com strategy – to create a network with critical mass
for free or really cheap, then start charging fees to use it once the value of
participation was sufficiently high.
Fourth, there’s a bit of “style obsolescence” going on. It’s more
obvious in the car manufacturing market than in computers (and more obvious in
clothing than in cars), but the basic idea is to make the new ones “cool” so
you’ll be more interested in abandoning the perfectly good product that you own
in favor of the more perfectly good one that they want you to own.
Imagine that I invented an electronic genealogy machine.
You slide your records into a paper feeder, and finished genealogies came out,
with information from the internet and every library and government office on
earth (it takes a lot of imagination, but stay with me here). Imagine that they
were going to last for ten years, and that I set up a factory and my elves made
them as fast as we could, and in 90 days, everyone on earth who wanted one had
one. Oops. Me and them elves are gonna have to clean swimming pools for the next
9 years. This is an overly simplified case, but the basic point is that
manufacturers want to keep their plants operating, their employees working, and
their bank accounts positive on payday.
One of the best ways to do this is to make products that
have a limited useful life. So we arrive at the basic premise that “if we make
newer and better products cheaper, people will buy them.” People aren’t forced
to buy them. My friend Bob’s work was fairly well insulated from “network
effects,” which led many others to change computers and computer usage long
before Bob did. There are cases of manufacturers who make disposable products
instead of lasting ones, and inferior products (think about Microsoft) instead
of better ones, but those products are defective, not obsolete.
I’m not singling Bob out for abuse. He’s not the extreme
case of continuing to use a product past the end of its popular usage cycle.
That honor goes to the good drivers of Cuba. Prior to 1960, Cuba was a large
importer of American cars. In 2004, they were still driving 31,760 of them. Half
were from the 1950’s, a quarter were from the 1940’s, and the rest were from the
1930’s. Think about that – driving a 70 year old car. Those cars were heavy, and
after a crash were often driveable, while the occupants were fatally injured.
Today’s cars are so safe (comparatively speaking) that people walk away from
head-on crashes, and the car looks like a value engineer’s dream. Clearly,
people can opt out of product cycles if they choose.
But the question I want to consider today is: “Is computer
hardware obsolescence so bad?” If we assume that the biggest factor is the
creation of newer, better, faster, cheaper products, then it might not be. Let’s
think about this logically. Consider the following statements.
If better cheaper
faster computers and scanners are available, I will have the choice of leaving
my current product. (I can use it ‘til it deteriorates if I choose, or just
do genealogy the old school way.)
If better cheaper
faster computers are not available, I will not have the choice of leaving my
current product. (I can’t get a better one, even if I want to.)
Put in those terms, hardware obsolescence is a form of free
choice. That sounds nice enough, so why does it bother people to have their
things fall into involuntary disuse? I think it’s related to the comment by
Frances Hesselbein, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Peter F
Drucker Foundation: “Successful companies preserve the core purpose and values
of the organization, and change everything else — practices, goals, and
strategies — to stay relevant.”
That’s what the customers are doing, too. We’re not using
computers, we’re doing genealogy --- and computers are the tools of choice for
some of us. We would change our practices, goals, and strategies, as well as our
products, to follow our consistent purpose of learning about our families and
communicating about them with others.
And as long as vendors and manufacturers help us serve our
own purposes, we’ll continue to buy what they’re selling.
Links (optional sidebar)
Classic American cars in Cuba:
http://www.lumika.org/cuba_vintage_american_cars.htm
http://www.danheller.com/cuba-cars.html