I spent the weekend at a family birthday party, where I was reminded that there’s a wide spread between the “leading edge” and “trailing edge” of technology. For those of us who spend our lives immersed in advanced technology, it’s useful to have such a reminder from time to time.

During the course of the weekend, I spent a fair amount of time chatting with two family members — I won’t embarrass them by identifying them — about some of the wonderful tools and technologies that have enriched my life during the past year or two. These family members don’t work in the computer field, but they’re intelligent, literate, and aware of the world around them. Each of them has a desktop and a laptop computer, and each of them uses e-mail and the Internet in a manner similar to that of millions of other people around the world. But neither of them had heard of Wikipedia; neither of them had heard of YouTube or the hilarious mashups like George Bush and Tony Blair singing a duet of “Eternal Love.” Indeed, they had never heard the term “mashup,” nor the term “long tail.” Blogs, MySpace, GoogleMaps, and a number of other familiar words and phrases were things they had heard about, but basically didn’t use or investigate.

Many people who are far wiser and more experienced than me would respond, None of this stuff matters. It’s all gadgets and gimmicks; none of it has any lasting value, and none of it is as important as the fundamental values and principles, tools and technologies with which today’s society has been built. And when we think back to some of the silly products and services that were being offered during the first wave of the Internet (and in which venture capitalists and naive stock-market traders invested billions of dollars), there’s good reason to be somewhat cynical about the long-term significance of many of the current technology-based products and services.

But if we assume, for the purpose of this discussion, that some or all of these new technologies will have a fundamental, lasting importance, then my weekend experience emphasizes another important principle: years, if not decades, can separate the “innovators’” adoption of technology, and the “laggards’” adoption of that same technology. I don’t work in the R&D laboratories where “bleeding edge” technologies are being developed; at best, I can describe myself as an “early adopter” of various technologies. And my family members are not Luddites who oppose any form of technology, nor are they “laggards” at the very tail-end of a technology adoption cycle; but they’re also not “early mainstream” adopters, and would probably be most accurately described as “late mainstream.”


These stages of technology adoption have been thoroughly discussed in books such as Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm; and the resistance to the “paradigm shifts” associated with important new technologies has been well described in books like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. You can see another perspective of the time-delay associated with Moore’s stages of technology adoption by clicking here. The main thing to remember is that new technologies are not adopted immediately; it took fifty years, for example, for the military to shift from the technology of muskets to the technology of rifles. Many of today’s technologies are adopted more quickly, but it can still take 15-20 years before we can reasonably assert, “Everyone but the Luddites is using this stuff.”

Cell phones, for example, initially became available in the U.S. sometime around 1990; 15 years later, the Washington Post reports that there are 190 million cell phones in use (see “So Many Cell Phones, So Little Web Searching“), which still means that 1/3 of the population doesn’t have one of these all-too-familiar devices. Worldwide, an estimated 1.35 billion cell phones were in use as of 2004, and an estimated two billion will be in use by 2008 (see “Buy Cell: How many mobile phones does the world need?“); thus, we’re still a year or two away from reaching the point where one-third of the world population has a cell phone.

The obvious conclusion that we early-adopters should draw from this is that the majority of friends, family members, and business associates (beyond, perhaps, our immediate circle of co-workers) are probably not using the technologies that we think are not only cool, but downright indispensable. Equally important, our customers, potential customers, suppliers, and vendors may not be using those technologies either. At the very least, it can be annoying and counter-productive if we assume that all of these folks are using the technologies that we’re dabbling with.

In fact, it can be downright dangerous. Most of us live in a world of competitors, and some of us have to deal with outright enemies — i.e., people who would not only like to put us out of business, but perhaps eliminate us completely and permanently. And while some of those folks may try to accomplish their objectives by using even more advanced technologies than the ones we’ve begun using, others are finding ways of confronting our high-tech competitive (and military) technologies with low-cost, low-tech methods and weapons of their own. The military examples are all too familiar, beginning with the use of knives and box-cutters during the 9-11 attacks, and continuing through today with relatively low-tech IED’s in Iraq. We don’t hear very much about the non-military examples in the day-to-day world of business competition, but they do exist.

All of which says to me that I need to escape from my high-tech world periodically, and spend some time with friends and family members to remind myself what the “real world” is all about.