Disruptive Technology

Welcome to the future

Its t's are crossed and i's are dotted with disruptive technology. And so, by the way, goes our past. In the 16th century, the Spanish conquered the indigenous mesoamerican civilizations by using the technological innovations of horses, trained dogs, gunpowder, and particularly steel. This led to bloodshed and subjugation. In other words, the disruption of an entire set of civilizations.

Fortunately, today, disruptive technology is a bit more gentle. We can see its force in lots of places.

Brick and Mortar

One example is online shopping. This is leading to increased availability of goods, and also it is leading to the demise of many brick and mortar stores. Online shopping, along with the prevalence of the superstore (WalMart, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy, Costco, etc.) is accelerating the disappearance of the mom-and-pop shops of yesterday. Amazon has a new thing called Price Check that may do much to kill off brick-and-mortar altogether.

OK, it's really only a trend. But there are markets that have been changed forever (or are on their way to being so). Let's look at a few.

Bank Branches

Consider bank branches. With automatic deposit, the prevalence of ATMs, and banking on your iDevice, who needs 'em? Perhaps banks will phase out paper checks. Paper checks are almost unheard of in Sweden, I have heard.

Record Stores, Video Stores

Now we look at some kinds of stores that have really been killed off by disruptive technology. Consider the record store. Record stores were just filled with disrupted technologies. I used to go to Tower Records over in Campbell quite often. First to get records. Then when records were disrupted by CDs, I went to get CDs. I remember getting VHS tapes there for hit movies. Then I remember that it was more DVDs that I was shopping for, because the DVD disrupted the VHS market. Eventually I stopped going to that store completely. Because of iTunes. Oh, and Netflix. Also, many people get their movies from on demand systems that are built into the cable providers. These technologies are disrupting entertainment media. Furthermore, this change is leading to the unbundling of packaged media.

Bookstores

Now consider two more venues for another commodity: books. Bookstores were partly eaten up by online sellers, like Amazon, and partly by superstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders. But they are poised to be defeated by online book delivery. The Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad are two devices leading this charge. Right now, the bookstore is on its way to extinction, like the record store.

Libraries

The second venue that is also on its way to extinction is the library. This one is the most troubling because of the issue that most books are not yet digitized. Google is having significant issues in doing just that. But if they succeed, the library is all but dead.

What could replace the library? A banks of servers containing all the printed information in existence, that's what. Stored redundantly. And, hopefully in some format that is as close to permanence as possible. Books, by the way are far from permanent. For instance, about 25 percent of the 14 million books at the Library of Congress are presently too brittle for normal use. We are going to need these information banks soon, folks.

Newsstands

Magazines are the next form of printed or manufactured media to be replaced by its downloadable cousin. As smartphones and tablets become more prevalent, so will the consumption of media through these devices. Some are predicting the death of printed media. And I haven't bought a newspaper in years. When Google News will do just as well, why would I?

Gadgets

Now let's look at gadgets. The smartphone is replacing a whole host of gadgets and thus disrupting all sorts of markets.

PNDs

Personal Navigation Device sales have been on the decline. For instance, an iPhone contains a GPS receiver, which seems to be displacing a whole bunch of hand-held GPS units. The TomTom, Garmin, and Magellan devices have all seeing lower sales since 2009. They are now starting to make apps for the smartphone market. Disruption.

MP3 Players

Smartphones, particularly the iPhone, have MP3-playing capability built in. So, why would you need an iPod if you had an iPhone? Well, it seems that the cannibalization hasn't become too bad yet, but we do see a decline in iPod sales.

Portable Gaming Consoles

Here it seems that the number of people using iPhone and iPad as portable gaming devices is on the rise. This may be due to the inclusion of fast graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware, and also to the inclusion of MEMS 3-axis accelerometers and gyroscopes. The sales of portable game software and hardware consoles are definitely moving towards iOS. For Nintendo, they have said that $925 million was lost to iOS in six months alone. They expect cannibalization of that market to continue in 2012.

Cameras

The iPhone cameras have been getting better and better. And so, their customers are using them more and more as their camera of choice, their camera of convenience. Consider Flickr uploads. The iPhone 4 is the most popular camera for uploads on that site. With a smartphone, a point-and-shoot is a hard sell these days. But, of course, that's not true for real camera enthusiasts. Ongoing issues such as rolling shutter and image stabilization are still drawbacks for smartphone cameras. And, of course, mechanical features like optical zoom and aperture control.

PCs

Are we in the post-PC era? It appears that the ascension of the processor under Moore's Law is near an end. Now, it appears to be less about how fast the main CPU runs, and more simply what a computing device can do. Nonetheless, if it is too slow, then many would say that it simply cannot do it.

The configuration of the computing device is changing to accommodate the limits in the increase in computing power, and frankly to accommodate the tasks that people want to perform with the devices. Specialized processors for graphics (GPUs), image processing (ISPs), and digital baseband processors are placed on Systems on a Chip (SoCs) along with application processors, some of which are starting to have multiple cores. Additionally, audio and video codec hardware is usually present as well.

Many of these organization changes for computing devices are happening because of the relentless pace of improvements required for smartphones and tablets. But, what of the desktop PC? In 2008, laptop shipments first exceeded desktop PC shipments in the US. Now, in 2011, even laptop shipment growth is slowing, due to tablets and smartphones.

Mobile computing devices are explosively more popular and important than desktop computing devices. This is particularly so for Apple.

Rotating Disk Storage Media

I probably can't come up with all the storage media that were outmoded and disrupted by new technology, but three things are clear: portability, media size, and access times are critical factors in desirability. Hard disks have increasingly fulfilled those requirements for decades. Now, a new technology is destined to take over: flash memory. Flash memory is the main component of Solid State Disks (SSDs). This is the kind of memory that makes up the local storage for smartphones and tablets. And, for a few years now, it is also beginning to take over laptop storage and even desktop storage. I see disruption happening here. Probably hybrid hard disk/SSD drives will provide an interim solution just like hybrid internal combustion/electric vehicles are flourishing at the present. But I expect that power requirements and weight requirements will win out and hard disks will become fully disrupted over time.

Displays

Once upon a time, I used a storage scope as a display on a CAD system. But these were eventually replaced by raster CRT devices. And those were replaced by LCD screens of various kinds (with compact fluorescent, and now LED backlights). My opinion is that the technology which produces a crisp, accurate, bright, high-contrast color picture and uses the least amount of power will win. So display technology is becoming disrupted constantly. Power requirements are paramount for displays (called panels) because batteries have a limited amount of power in mobile devices such as tablets.

Microelectronic Mechanical Systems (MEMS)

MEMS gyroscope from the iPhone 4S
Source: chipworks.com

Ever use an iPhone? a Wii? How about a camera? Pretty much all new technology that exists uses MEMS somewhere. MEMS devices are actual mechanical devices that are so small that their workings can't really be seen by the human eye. They are designed, usually, as small parts intended to be placed on the tiny circuit boards that live inside our devices and gadgets. Each part might only be 1-2 cubic millimeters. The modern iPhone 4S, for instance, contains three MEMS devices on board: a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscope, and an electronic compass.

MEMS ratchet
Source: memx.com

MEMS devices are used inside our cars as well, sensing acceleration and deploying air bags (perhaps deploying a roll bar automatically), or sensing the pressure of our tires, for instance. Tiny mirrors made of MEMS technology are used in optical applications, such as Digital Light Processing (DLP) where arrays of hundreds of thousands of micro mirrors are used. Now, crystals that set a time base for electronics are beginning to be replaced by MEMS resonators. A MEMS 3-axis accelerometer gives Nintendo's Wii information about the motion of the user's hand.

As time goes on, MEMS technology will have to go down to an even smaller scale to accomplish more and more complex tasks mechanically. This will require increasing reliance on nanotechnology. This already occurs as manufacturers work to prevent stiction from affecting the surfaces of their MEMS devices, using a nanotechnology technique called Self-Assembled Monolayers to coat their surfaces.


As devices get smaller, they increasingly become part of our everyday lives. And technology becomes actually useful. MEMS devices are helping us do more with flair. With MEMS devices, an iPhone or an iPad has the ability to sense the physics of the user's control, allowing a simulated airplane to pitch, yaw, and roll.

Check out iSuppli for information about the MEMS markets and competitive analysis. Another excellent source of information about this market is Yolé Developpment from France.

Welcome to Relativistic Observer

Things are moving fast, very fast. Take some time to see the thin and thick of it all, condensed into one relativistic soup. Dilate your mind and contract your focus to the future. What matters is energy, while our health is central to surviving the lightyears. Technology enables us to do more with less. Without creativity there is no point to existence at all.

I, Mark Zimmer, am a generalist. I claim some expertise in technology and creativity. I have enabled people to do more with less by creating Painter. I live in California.

You may see, from time to time, posts about my past. Maybe some new music I have written. But mostly here you will be able to observe the quickly changing world around us, some world events, and what it all means for the future.

Greetings!