Doesn't matter the venue, most steps that push progress forward are the stuff of babies. They are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, building or tweaking an existing method or feature to extend the envelope a little further. Your new car might come with LED lights vs standard bulbs. Nice to look to at, but the net result is nothing significantly different to light your way. Or your new vacuum might employ a higher speed motor to pull more dirt out of your carpet. It may be great at sucking up pet hair, but it still requires rolling forward and back to clean up the family room. And that Multi-Peel Y-shaped Julienne Peeler might indeed be easier on your hands. But you still need to rake it across your zucchini to make zoodles.
It's rare that something is truly "new." That's because it takes a leap of imagination that few of us have to come up with a different way of looking at things. Henry Ford gets the credit, and though he didn't actually say it it rings true nonetheless: "If I'd ask customers what they wanted, they would've told me a faster horse." Steve Jobs built on that by pointing out that "People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."
That unwritten book is the stuff of inflection points. There is before the Sony Walkman and after, before the Apple iPhone and after, before Amazon Alexa and after. Once each was introduced others rushed to make "me too" variations, some better some worse, as well as multiple spin offs and accessories which themselves grew into cottage industries. But once you got used to using a mouse, it's hard to imagine not having one.
Then again, not all things imagined till now are necessarily a good idea. Take the latest from Amazon, the Ring Always Home Cam. The Ring brand started as a smarter doorbell, one which transmitted video to your phone when the button was pressed. Not a bad idea, marrying a door knocker to a security camera. Line extensions have followed, including stand-alone security systems with cameras and detectors, and smart lighting that turns on when triggered by motion.
But what if you get an alert and can't tell where the breach is? The Ring Always Home Cam doesn't just pan and zoom in on the trouble spot, it literally goes there. It's basically an autonomous miniature drone with a camera that flies to the point in question, transmitting a live feed to your phone. That way you can see the burglar as he comes in and, well, what? Follow him around? Watch him knock it out of the air? Until they sell the death laser accessory pack to go with it, probably the best use is to patrol the house when you go out for the night to make sure your kid doesn't raid the liquor cabinet.
Or you can go the other way. Justine Haupt is a Science Associate at the Brookhaven National Lab, specializing in research on cosmology, radio astronomy and quantum instrumentation. Like many, in her spare time she like to putter. But where my version of puttering involves running an extension cord under the couch, hers involves things like a metrological test stand for CCD flatness characterization.
That level of technical acumen led her to develop a sort-of-retro rotary 4G cell phone. Justine eschews smartphones, but wanted something to replace her old flip phone that tapped into some of the more useful features of that today's devices. While still in development (a DIY kit is due out in the spring), her design marries the innards of a LTE phone with a rotary dial and a mechanical ringer, along with an e-ink screen to show numbers called and incoming. It's kind of Frankenstein-esque, but much cuter.
Justine's phone may be a step back and the Ring drone a step forward. But which defines progress? Is it the thing that pushes the envelope that you would never use, or the one that does so selectively and you can't wait to try? I know what I would pick. Justine, please put me down for one in Atomic Hotline Red.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes to be on the trailing edge of hi tech. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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