About 8 years ago I was working for a little company that has since
gone out of business and I sent out an email message to the
management mailing list describing something like this, only more so.
I think that the picture described in this report is a transitional
step in an even more fundamental change in the economy. Instead of
the limit of what's possible being going to a kiosk to select a
green minivan instead of a white one, you'll be able to sit down for
several evenings in your den and design a car of your own with
software that you will rent, get the design certified, put the
construction out for bids, and get the car delivered to your house.
Most people won't want to do this, but it will be possible, and will
result in huge increases in the rate of innovation. As a trivial
example, I "invented" a fruit-picking implement once that I made an
instance of and used to pick oranges when I had trees. It took me
hours with various implements to build it (including welding equipment
and an anvil) so I never made another one in spite of the fact that
lots of my relatives wanted them and insisted that they would sell if
I made a bunch of them. If it has been easy to do, I would have made
50, given half away and tried to sell the others at a local garden
supply store, and in a world like the one I see coming, it will be
easy, so every bright auto mechanic will be inventing tools instead of
making do, and do will every bright cook, gardener, surgeon, teacher,
grocer, ...
A lot of the capital of existing companies is in ideas that have been
materialized into fairly static form, such as a particular design of
a car, while what is really valuable at those companies are meta-ideas
like how to design cars and what constitutes a safe design. Once it's
feasible to build one of a kind things for basically, say no more
than half again the price, as something that was mass produced
(and I think that the impediment now for a number of big ticket
items it is more managing the process than making the object) this
kind of change will begin to take off.
The internet is just the plumbing, but it was what I thought was
the big missing catalyst then. I just wish I'd realized that the
internet was going to be the plumbing... |
