Chapter 12: Sleepless (and angry) in Seattle

As the Future Catches You is quite a fitting title for this book; in Chapter 12 (of 15 total) Juan Enriquez opens by saying that people are squirming in Seattle, a representative city, because they feel as if they are on a treadmill that is going rather too fast. The rate of change keeps increasing, and people hardly have time to adjust before something new is presented to them. Large companies fall; small companies blossom. The New York Times, established in 1851 with 13,400 employees is worth 6.8 billion dollars, contrasted with the 100 billion dollar Internet news site Yahoo! who have a fraction of the employees (1/7). IBM had to make way for Microsoft when it became apparent that the operating system is much more important than the machine it runs on. Genomics patents increased 25% between 1999 and 2000. This rate of change has become overwhelming for many employees in any company. Companies merge to keep themselves alive rather than to make themselves as big as possible. They need to evolve with the market, which is quickly becoming impossible.

"Countries, businesses, governments that seek to protect, to maintain the status quo are bound to get poorer quickly as technology flourishes in other regions." (page 182) This is quite true; in economics a country is just a business. It is only as good as what it produces, what it can make. If a country wants to stay ahead then they must stay on top of the latest trends, especially involving technology. Technologies take less stress off people, and therefore more technology frees up more people for other things. While we have more and more people involved in technology development the actual technologies themselves are meant to save time, improve quality of life, and increase production. With everything getting bigger and bigger countries need to master new technology and be inventive to keep themselves from falling behind.

I think this chapter is a bit unfair. I do think that technologies are evolving more and more quickly. I think changes are happening faster than people can cope with them. However, I don't think that some of these assertions are quite truthful and actually I believe them to be somewhat misleading. New companies should be more successful; old companies have reputation on their side, but that also means they have certain expectations of them. The New York Times can't rapidly change. Yahoo, however, could assess the situation, the basic needs of a modern consumer and meet them fully. This would account for their rapid growth and their instant success. Technology and the fact that the Internet is free has made it much easier for people to communicate and word-of-mouth (so to speak) goes much faster which can also attribute to the fast-paced change. I think these are some lurking variables (a lurking variable is a variable that has an important effect on the relationship among the variables in a study but is not included among the variables.) Also, I think that in the case of IBM and Microsoft, or Xerox and Microsoft, Apple and others are misinterpreted. While these events really happened, it is more predictable than it is made out to be. There will always be revolutionary companies, and they probably won't last. Other people will take their ideas, change them, perfect them and then make money off of them, stealing all of the first companies business. In this way it's an unfair comparison and a misleading conclusion.

The consequences of this situation can be economical. Investments are discussed; early technologies are invested in too quickly and are then replaced with similar, improved technologies. Xerox stocks, for example, plunged from $65 a share in 1998 to $5 a share in 2000. The fast-paced progression of technology and the volume of revolutionary companies are a consideration and a possible future danger to investors. Also, companies have to make some very difficult financial decisions. Investing in technology is very expensive, and very risky. Your companies pharmaceutical investment of $500,000,000 (pg 177) could turn into a revolutionary drug which makes you more money than you ever dreamed. It could also amount to nothing, and you can lose a third of your company. Not making these decisions for fear of making the wrong ones will just leave you behind as everyone else progresses. Economic results have become unpredictable- there is not any equation that can tell the future. And the future will just catch you anyway.