Week 2 Journal

First of all, I must confess that the reading of Winston was really painful. His article is full of academic terms which I am not used to seeing.  Yet, I tried to decipher the article and found some interesting points.

In his article, Winston insists that if prototypes are to be accepted in and spread to society they should fill the needs that a supervening necessity has created. In chapter 1 he refers to an episode where the first electrical telegraph system was denied by French government.  I knew this story beforehand and thought that this had taken place because of a lack of imagination which bureaucracy often falls into. However, now it is clear that the reason why this revolutionary invention was turned down was simply because Semaphores adopted by the French army at that time was much superior and more reliable.

Also, it is very interesting that when Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent for his invention he did not have any vision of how it would be utilized.  I guess people at that time, including Bell, simply had no notion of wireless communication.  In Winston’s words, lots of subsequent “Ideation” by many brilliant inventors brought enormous inventions to realization. That reminds me of the dawn of the Internet when the term “multimedia” came up: most people did not know what the word really meant.

The article from The Economist is very interesting too.  In that, the author predicted that Skype would take over conventional phones in 5 years.  Now, three years after the article was written, Skype is still distant from dominating the market. One of the reasons, I think, is because Skype is a closed community and allows free calls only between its members. If people put their priority more on making random phone calls to whoever has a phone number, Skype does not meet the social necessity. On the other hand, since telephone fares are held relatively low, supervening necessity for free phone is not yet strong enough. However, I think, VOIP will definitely dominate the market.

*My question is, what is the best strategy for VOIP to dominate the market?

*What is the advantage of traditional telephony? Compared to VOIP?

*Is there any disruptive technology? Other than VOIP?