The Power of a Good Demo

While in Japan this last week I got the chance to look at a bunch of new technology currently in the research and development phase. Unfortunately I can't go into what innovations I think are exciting, due to non-disclosure agreements, but I can use examples from years ago to help illustrate the point I am trying to make.

There are some inventions that change the world yet can be difficult to understand without a compelling demo. Imagine being at Bell Labs in 1948 when William Shockley invented the bipolar junction transistor. At the time, it served as a replacement to vacuum tubes and some engineers saw it as an inferior replacement. Audiophiles or people who are looking for pure sound from their audio equipment still prefer tube amps to solid-state ones (those that use transistors). Yet look at how many inventions came out of something so small and simple as the transistor: calculators, mobile phones, computers, and pretty much every electronics device being sold today.

I think it took a lot of imagination for the early inventors to realized the importance of their discovery. I remember hearing about Google's acquisition of YouTube and laughed at the huge price they paid. At the time I didn't know how people would use this new online service. Now any time I go to work on a car, I check YouTube first to see if there are any helpful videos. I'm not alone as Thomas Watson, the president of IBM is claimed to have said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." We all can fail to see the greatness of certain innovations.

Going back to my trip to Japan, I got to see some really new technology and one of the things that made the trip so interesting was all of the compelling demos. While an introduction to a particular invention is good, seeing how it can be used really helped me understand how groundbreaking it is. This helped me with some of the projects I am working on as I can see that I need to create some compelling demos so other can catch the same vision I see. Now I just hope that I can write about some of the things in the near future.