Things about technology _ 3 _ the essence of Western technology management

Iii. essence of Western technology management

1. From a technical perspective: S-curve

I want you to know how many teeth the old dog has!

-- Alan)

If technology is used as a dog, the dog will have a puppy stage, a big dog stage, and an old dog stage. This is the life cycle of technology.

Foster uses the S curve to describe the technology's lifecycle: if the performance/performance that a technology can achieve changes over time, an S curve can be obtained. This conclusion is intuitive and I have no good explanation.

Figure 1 dog's life

Sometimes, when there is a local technical breakthrough, the S curve may change, and there are several waves in the middle, such:

Figure 2 mutant dog

2. From the product perspective: AU model and leading design

With a loud bang in the sky, Lao Tzu debuted.

-- Countless signatures

The following describes the growth process of a dog from the perspective of products and technologies.

The AU models of Abernathy and Utterback are the most important models used to describe the dynamic process of industrial innovation. Taking the time as the horizontal axis, the frequency of product innovation or technological innovation as the vertical axis, we can get a figure like this:

AU model and leading design

In the early stage of the product life cycle, product innovation is the main factor, product changes are fast, and the design is complex. enterprises do not know what kind of product meets the market needs, and the product is in the stage of continuous technological and commercial exploration, the dominant design is not yet determined.

After a period of development, technologies and the market are tossing and dropping, this will produce a widely accepted design scheme and become the dominant design.

After the design finalized, the product innovation rate began to decline, the product was basically stable, and the professional production technology gradually replaced the general production technology. The focus of innovation shifted from product innovation to process innovation, and the cost was quickly reduced.

These three phases correspond to three phases: the scurve puppies, the big dogs, and the old dogs.

At the beginning of the new industry, before the emergence of Dominant Design, there was a wave of enterprises. After the dominant design emerged, the total number of enterprises reduced and eventually stabilized on several large companies.

The core concept here is the dominant design. Windows is the dominant design of the PC operating system.

Features of the Dominant Design:

(A) Dominant Design is the design that leads the market and the de facto standard of the market. Even if it is not for me, it is not much worse than for me.

(B) leading design is not necessarily the best design. A typical example is the QWERTY keyboard we are currently using. It was designed to reduce the typing speed rather than increase the typing speed: it was easy to pin keys when typewriters were typing fast, the designer specially designed a very awkward keyboard, which slowed down the typing speed and reduced the card key. Everyone bought it, so it became the dominant design.

(C) It is difficult to predict which design will eventually become the dominant design. In many cases, it is hard to decide which design is the dominant one, instead of which is the most expensive and which is the backend, it is often -- a loud bang in the sky, and Lao Tzu's debut -- suddenly came out from somewhere.

(D) The emergence of Dominant Design will lead to a sharp change in industry competition. The website will be very popular with the camp, so it is hard to say that the website is wrong.

3. From the market perspective: the proliferation and bridging of Innovation

In the book "The proliferation of innovation", Rogers divides a new product/technology adopter into five types based on their adoption time:

Rogers Innovation Diffusion Curve

· Innovators are brave pioneers and consciously promote innovation. Innovators play a very important role in the process of innovation and communication.

Early Adopters are respected and public opinion leaders who are willing to guide fashion and try new things, but are cautious.

Early Majority was adopted in the Early days. They were thoughtful and cautious, but they were more willing to accept changes than ordinary people.

· People who use Late Majority in the future are skeptical. They will only adopt Late Majority when the public accepts new things.

· Latencies (Laggards) are a group of conservative and traditional people. They are used to following the old principles and are picky about new things. They will be passively accepted only when new developments become mainstream and traditional.

This division is very important for new product/new technology promoters. Different promotion strategies should be adopted for different groups of people.

 

If we associate the innovative Diffusion Curve of Rogers with the AU model, the key point is the dominant design, which is accepted by most people and appears near the middle black circle.

Another observation by Rogers is important for developers and product managers: whether a new thing can be accepted depends on the following factors:

· Relative advantage: the advantage of new things over existing things is more and more acceptable

· Compatibility: compatibility is the compatibility between new things and old things and user habits. The better the compatibility, the easier it is to accept.

· Complexity: the more complex things are, the more unacceptable they are.

· Reliability: more reliable, more acceptable.

· Sensitiveness: What is easy to try is easier to accept than what is hard to try. What is intuitive is easier to accept than what is not intuitive.

Return to the Rogers curve:

 

Some users in the dotted circle are potential users of new technologies/new products in the early stage. During this period, the products may not have been formed yet, we need to study this part of users to clarify the concept and prototype of the product. Hippel calls this part of users Lead users, and proposes a leading User method to help them shape the product in the early stages.

After we have achieved the goal of leading users, can we climb the mountain as we become the leader? Can biubiubiu climb the mountain to occupy the mainstream market?

This temptation is not small.

In doing so, most of the results were miserable.

Moore explained this phenomenon. He slightly changed the Innovation Diffusion Curve of Rogers and moved most people to the right, so there was a deep gap between this group and the early adopters on the left. Many of those who rolled up their trouser legs and climbed onto the mountains planted the gutter.

Why is there a gutter?

Because early users and most users have different product concerns.

Taking the operating system as an example, early users of computers are large enterprises, research institutions, such as operating systems, OS/2, UNIX ....... They have high requirements on machine performance and program stability. Pheasant PC users have very low requirements on stability and often restart machines, they have high requirements on the ease of operation of the program and fast release of functions. Well, the price is not high yet. As a result, those computers and minicomputers fell into the trap. Microsoft jumped out and occupied the Mainstream users.

I have read an article analyzing the development of operating systems in the early 1990 s. I vaguely remember that among many development systems, the R & D cost of windows is USD 30 million, which is the last. The boss is ibm OS/2, and the R & D cost is more than 10 billion USD.

This Yin GOU is not so good across the past, and it is a day before. Based on the previous discussion, we can find that the front of the gutter is the dominant design.

How can we cross the gutter? Moore summarized the story in crossing the gap. I did not take this book seriously, but I just heard from my teacher that I remember something like bowling. One hit, one hit, and one hit won if I hit it.

4. Competition: creative destruction

The above is about a single technology. Next, we will introduce the competitive technology-pheasant technology. Back to the "S" curve: the pheasant technology did not match the old dog Technology in the early stage. Later, it grew up and became a phoenix, surpassing the old dog.

Pheasant and old dog

For pheasant technology, there are two challenges:

The first challenge is the survival problem when it comes to pheasant or pheasant. In the mainstream market, all the old dogs are seen at a glance, and there is no pheasant at all. To survive a pheasant, you must find a market suitable for it. This market is its niche market, and it is the one in which the pheasant can survive ).

The major markets occupied by the niche market and the old dog are not the same. As the pheasant grew to a swan, its technical indicators began to approach the old dog. The Pheasant technology began to enter the mainstream market from a niche market, and a war broke out at any time.

In the old dogs's view, this battle will erupt at the point where the pheasant technology reaches the old dog Technology (3 points ). The fact is that the war broke out earlier than the old dogs expected (point 2 in the figure). In a twinkling of an eye, the sky was changing and the sky was changing.

To explain this, you need to understand the characteristics and product attributes of your needs:

· A product has many attributes. At a certain stage, one or two attributes are dominant.

· What users need is good enough products, not necessarily the best products.

Example:

There are two types of luminescence materials. The first type is radioactive material A, which has A long luminous duration. The other is material B, which is stored during the day and released at night, which emits light for a short period of time. At the beginning, it was A monopoly market. At this time, B only went out in 2 or 3 hours at A time, and it was useless at all. Later, with continuous research and development, B's time grew slowly. By six hours, it was still not enough, and it had no impact on. Once the luminous time of B is increased to 8 hours, the customer will feel that, ah, this can be used to meet my needs. They think of A as radioactive material, which is harmful to people. They don't have to, don't, and don't have to. They all use B, even though A's luminous duration is still tens of thousands of times longer than B's.

For customers, what they want is sufficient, not the best. Once enough, their focus will immediately change to other attributes. In these attributes, the old dog cannot compare with the pheasant at all. For example, the pheasant can fly.

In the middle, the two dotted lines are the technical requirements of the mainstream market and the base market, and the two solid lines are the performance or other indicators that the old dog Technology and pheasant technology can provide. At the beginning, pheasant technology could only meet the needs of a niche market. With the growth of pheasant, once it can meet the needs of the mainstream market, other features of technology become important, becoming better than the old dog technology, and suddenly beat the old dog in the market.

Christensen's classic book The Innovator's Dilemma (The Innovator's Dilemma) has done in-depth research on this. Prior to him, MIT's Rebecca Henderson studied the photoprint targeting industry, where every time a new product was produced, its industry leader went bankrupt three times. She observed that once the product architecture changes, these large companies would collapse. As long as technological changes are limited to the product level, rather than going deep into the architecture itself, these companies will be safe. Christensen is studying the disk drive industry and found that the same is true.

Christensen explained these phenomena.

He divided technology into two categories: destructive technology and maintenance technology.

This classification is for enterprises. Maintenance Technology is the technology that can improve the current situation of enterprises. On the contrary, it is destructive technology. For example, for Microsoft, Windows and. NET are maintenance technologies, while Linux and Java are destructive technologies.

After long-term development, mature enterprises have optimized their organizations, business models, product lines, supply chains, and incentive mechanisms, is very efficient. Christensen is called the value network. Maintenance Technology is a technology that can enhance this value network, and destructive technology is a technology that can damage this value network.

In enterprises, destructive technologies cannot find a living space in this optimized value network. Employees will not agree (destructive technology will only spend money at the beginning, but will only see reaction and thankfulness), management will not agree (no performance), and shareholders will not agree.

Suppose there are two employees A and B in the company. A is engaged in continuous technology and has visible performance. We can see the contribution to the company. B is engaged in destructive technology, I don't see any contribution to the company, and the market doesn't recognize it very much. How much can I make for B? As A result, A's psychology is unbalanced: Mom, I am tired and tired, earning 1 million yuan for the company. You spent 1 million yuan on the kid, and I didn't see any one. I still took the money. The result is: B can either stop or quit. If you want to quit, you can get out and do it on your own.

Many pheasant techniques are evicted by old dogs like this. When the pheasant grows up, the old dogs will feel the need to change. However, all the old dogs are optimized according to the old technology, and all the new technologies have to be changed, there's no way to do it-it's like this: it's destroyed by the pheasant.

5 Summary

The above are the most important technology management theories I think. These graphs provide a complete technical analysis framework. What is the current stage of a technology in the S-curve? Did the Dominant Design appear? What stage is it in the diffusion process? Is it destructive or maintenance technology for our company? Understanding this is conducive to technological selection and decision-making.

Others, such as network effects, are also worth understanding for programmers. This is not detailed here.

Having written so much in a row, I am too tired to rest for a while.