Sundwall's Law

“Every age celebrates its own modernity” a teacher of mine once said and I’m sure it’s true. I have no doubt that ancient Egyptians were wowed by the latest advances in papyrus making, irrigation and stone cutting. Like the cowboy in Oklahoma who sings “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City” they too probably told themselves that they “had gone about as far as they could go.”

We do it ourselves too, of course, even while we know that future generations will look back and laugh at the innovations and technologies that we all think are gee-whiz today.

With the increasing slope of innovation, however, technology marvels soar high and then fall just as quickly into obsolescence, and this is now well within the easy memory of us all. We remember the convenience of three and a half inch floppies, bulky cell phones, our first luggable laptops and much else. We know that all of the things that are insanely great today will soon be displaced by the insanely greater.

Many of the most useful technology tools start out lame and get better rapidly; almost nothing is great in its first iteration. That’s why we in technology hate to buy version 1.0 of anything.

Early versions are apt to be clunky, hard to use, of questionable value, and sometimes laughably lame. Remember handwriting recognition? GPSs, PDAs? Speaking computers that sounded more like a drunken Swede than the computer on board the Enterprise? Remember voice recognition that you had to teach to understand you, laboriously repeating a vocabulary of words in the hope that it would recognize your voice? Now Siri (just one example) understands everyone right out of the iPhone box, and she talks back to you (and sounds so much better than that drunken Swedish guy).

This leads me to what I have called “Sundwall’s Law”. It goes like this: in order to have a great version of anything, you almost always have to go through a bad version. Want a great cell phone? Put up with a bad cell phone. Want the iPad? Suffer through the Newton and the Palm Pilot. There are thousands of examples.

I was thinking of Sundwall’s Law last month when I saw a report about Carla, the airport virtual assistant now working 24x7 at Logan International Airport in Boston. She’ll greet you with a smile, give you directions, and help you through security. She speaks two languages and she’s not bad looking either. She’s there for you. So what if she’s a hologram?

Well, ‘video projection’ actually, but who cares? Other versions of Carla are now on duty at Dulles, New York’s three airports and in Europe too. You’ll be talking to one soon.

(All these assistants are attractive young females, BTW, but that’s a subject for a different blog.)

You may laugh, or find it all a bit creepy, but I predict the acceptance rate will be rapid and total. The applications in so many other customer service environments guarantee that these virtual assistants will go through rapid research, development and deployment. Carla doesn’t exactly interact with you now, but Sundwall’s Law predicts that soon she will. Would you bet against it?

Speaking of betting, I was talking with my friend Nick Donato from IBM earlier this year and we got on the subject of driverless cars. We both knew that the technology is still in its infancy, and naturally it makes us all a bit nervous. Nick was skeptical about how fast this one would go mainstream, but I thought it was inevitable. There are many worrisome flaws with the current version of this technology (as I pointed out in a previous post). But before you have a great version, you have to have a bad version.

So I made Nick a $100 bet that driverless cars would be commercially viable sooner than either of us could imagine; the proof would be that within ten years, one of us would ride in one in a completely normal fashion on the streets of Chester County.

We’re not even one year into this bet and driverless cars have already been made legal (in test mode) on the streets of Nevada.  I’m predicting they’ll be coming soon to your neighborhood. And who knows, maybe Carla will be at the wheel.