The brick wall

Today I was concentrating so hard during the Management lecture in campus, I Kind of dozed off … Following is an account of my thoughts,

Every technology I have seen and used has not changed that much in the last 15 years. The cars still drive 80 mph on the highways. The CD has been around for more than a decade, and it has not changed that much. These things are just examples of mature technology, at which major innovation has stopped and the development of technology has reached the “brick wall”.

Each technology will reach a brick wall, at which the costs of research are not worth the revenues generated by an extra demand, or decreasing costs. An example is the four-wheeled box in your garage, the automobile.

However, the problem with most of these technologies is that a big technological revolution is long overdue. If we look at the automobile, the technology of the Internal combustion engine has not changed in more than hundred years. And man has not found a better alternative to the energy from fossil fuel which is a limited resource.Of course we are doing incremental development. Increasing the speed of the cars, efficiency etc. However no flying cars or any major change in design has come up.

I wonder how much of this problem is due to the organizational structure of big organizations which are profit oriented. They are so interested in making profit that they do not spend their Research and Development money on radical technology changes. Rather trying to get “quick cash” out of the already available technology. For example take the automobile industry, they have added so much to the cars, stereos, LCD tvs, GPS systems…But still the car basically has remained the same. Boring old four wheels run by Gasoline. No one has been able to think “out of the box” and radically redesign the car. Some would ask me, “Why redesign it if the design is not broken?”. Let me tell you then. The cars we drive today are the reason that the world is in such a crisis for fuel and food too. Isn’t that enough reason to rethink the whole strategy?

My view is that the science is already available. You just have to watch Discovery channel to see that! It is the Engineers’ job to put that science into practical use. And the big companies have to think more in long term planning rather than short term profit making.

Un-Americanizing the world

The Middle East countries are looking at switching their Dollar reserves into Euros because of the decline of the Dollar against the Euro. This to me is going to be the toughest challenge that the American economy will face in the first quarter of ‘08.

Until the late 1990s, America was the uncontested superpower of the world. So in my whole post-cold-war life from 1984 (My birthyear) onwards, I have known this country as a juggernaut in the economic, military, cultural and many other areas. However with the minor recession in the early 2000s and the fuel price and inflation worries of the present day, the 21st century is not treating Uncle Sam very cordially.

It all started with the bad judgements made by Mr. Alan Greenspan, now falling on the shoulders of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke who seems to be withering under the pressure of it all. The sub prime crisis was the initial indication that the American economy was sick, now it seems the sickness was so cancerous that it may even be depressive for the US economy.

So what does this all mean for a guy like me living in a developing country? Well first of all, the US is a major trading partner for our country’s garment exports, so a decline in US consumer spending would mean less demand for our products, and more unemployment and more trade deficit. If you get what I mean. However the emergence of the EU as a major market and the advent of India as an emerging market will hopefully drive the demand for our exports.

That is another piece of the jigsaw for today.