Ancestry Magazine

For your consideration, I submit the following:

Item. My brother is an old-school genealogist. He writes to county clerks asking if they have records with the name he wants, then he writes back to request the records. In the mail. The kind with a stamp and an envelope and a dog-delicacy deliveryman. He drives to the Clayton Library and uses a pencil to make notes about indexes that he reads in paper books. He knows computers, he’s not a Luddite. He’s just comfortable doing research that way.

Item. My friend Bob, since retired, used to own a clothing store for women. He bought an IBM PC XT when it was expensive—the state of the art. He was still using it in his business ten years later. He was the last person I knew who was using one (and the only one I know that paid for SmartCom software). Bob was familiar with the fact that as long as a computer will turn on, it will continue to do whatever it did the day it came in the door.

Item. I recently received the following e-mail:

“Greetings to you in the name of the most high God, from my beloved country Nigeria. I am sorry and I solicit your permission into your privacy. I am Barrister William Afume, lawyer to the late Dr. Ndugu Abacus, a brilliant Nigerian mathematician.

“My former client, late Dr. Ndugu Abacus, died in a mysterious plane crash in the year 1999 on the way to a scientific conference to make an announcement of the utmost importance to mankind.

“He was planning to present a paper regarding his extensive work on hardware obsolescence. It is said that the product obsolescence methodology he had developed, would be roughly ten times more successful compared to the latest Microsoft techniques. The plan was contained in a leather case, and stored on a privately owned island close to the coast of Nigeria. Dr. Ndugu Abacus is also the King of the local tribe by heritage….”

Item. I have a Hewlett Packard Scanjet IIp. It’s a black and white scanner with a very nice sheet feeder attached. I’ve had it longer than Bob kept his XT. I haven’t used it in awhile. It requires a SCSI connector (SCSI, pronounced “scuzzy,” is an acronym for “small computer system interface”). The SCSI connector requires an XP compatible driver. The driver requires an old DOS-type memory resid ent program, which has to be loaded at startup. It hasn’t run reliably on my last two computers, and I suspect it’s that the operating system, the drivers, the SCSI adapter card and its driver don’t all communicate with the application the way they did when it was last updated, in the early nineties.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten 1992. An article by Robert A. Mamis, published in Inc. Magazine in June of that year, said: “First it was a mouse, then color, then CD-ROM. Now it’s a scanner that the well-equipped system has to acquire…HP ScanJet IIp for Macintosh is $1,095; for PC and Micro Channel systems, $1,295.” Lest you think I was ever closely associated with that kind of swag, I want to say that I paid less than half that for mine. Did he say “Micro Channel?”

Get to the Point
What does all of this have to do with hardware obsolescence? Basically, everything. Hardware obsolescence means that a thing is no longer usable. It’s not the same thing as wearing out—that’s deterioration. An obsolete thing is still capable of performing its original function, but there is a barrier to its continued use for that purpose.

Those barriers include:

• Technological development. It is disruptive. New materials, smaller circuits, improvements, and order management all help make the next one better, cheaper, and faster. This is a very powerful force, because it creates awareness on the part of manufacturers that building a computer product to last twenty years is folly. It’s complicated b y the interaction between the layers of hardware, application software, operating systems, driver programs, and networks that make up the current futuristic computing environment.
• The known short product life leads to “value engineering.” That’s what makes it break the day after the warranty runs out. Value engineers go home at night and dream of devices with components that all disintegrate to ashes at the same instant and then fall into the nearest wastebasket. If any recognizable parts remain, the value engineer is having a bad dream.
• Computer-use takes place in networks, which create external effects that have an impact on the long-term value of a product. These are called “network effects.” I don’t mean networks of people, but networks of connections, like the Internet, help to create bigger networks of people. For example, eBay is more valuable if a lot of people are buying. It attracts more sellers, which attracts more buyers. The value of participation on eBay is greater today than it was in September of 1995, when the business was founded. You might have a perfectly good word processor, or spreadsheet, or floppy drive, but if your friends and family have a different one, yours is possibly obsolete.
• And finally, there’s a bit of “style obsolescence” going on. It’s more obvious in the car manufacturing market than in computers (and more obvious in clothing than in cars), but the basic idea is to make the new ones “cool” so you’ll be more interested in abandoning the perfectly good product you own in favor of the more perfectly good one that the manufacturers want you to own.

Imagine that I invented an electronic genealogy machine. You slide your records into a paper feeder, and finished genealogies come out with information from the Internet and every library and government office on earth (it takes a lot of imagination, but stay with me here). Imagine that these genealogies were going to last for ten years, and that I set up a factory and my elves made them as fast as we could, and in ninety days, everyone on earth who wanted one had one. Oops. Me and them elves are gonna have to clean swimming pools for the next nine years. This is an overly simplified case, but the basic point is that manufacturers want to keep their plants operating, their employees working, and their bank accounts positive on payday.

One of the best ways to do this is to make products that have a limited useful life. So we arrive at the basic premise that “if we make newer and better products cheaper, people will buy them.” People aren’t forced to buy them. My friend Bob’s work was fairly well insulated from “network effects,” which led many others to change computers and computer usage long before Bob did. There are cases of manufacturers who make disposable products instead of lasting ones, and inferior products instead of better ones, but those products are defective, not obsolete.

I’m not singling Bob out for abuse. He’s not the extreme case of continuing to use a product past the end of its popular usage cycle. That honor goes to the good drivers of Cuba. Prior to 1960, Cuba was a large importer of American cars. In 2004, they were still driving 31,760 of them. Half were from the 1950s, a quarter were from the 1940s, and the rest were from the 1930s. Think about that—driving a seventy-year-old car. Those cars were heavy, and after a crash were often driveable, while the occupants were fatally injured. Today’s cars are so safe (comparatively speaking) that people walk away from head-on crashes, and the car looks like a value engineer’s dream. Clearly, people can opt out of product cycles if they choose.

But the question I want to consider today is: Is computer hardware obsolescence so bad? If we assume that the biggest factor is the creation of newer, better, faster, cheaper products, then it might not be. Let’s think about this logically. Consider the following statements:

• If better, cheaper, faster computers and scanners are available, I will have the choice of leaving my current product. (I can use it until it deteriorates if I choose or just do genealogy the old-school way.)
• If better, cheaper, faster computers are not available, I will not have the choice of leaving my current product. (I can’t get a better one, even if I want to.)

Put in those terms, hardware obsolescence is a form of free choice. That sounds nice enough, so why does it bother people to have their things fall into involuntary disuse? I think it’s related to the comment by Frances Hesselbein, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation: “Successful companies preserve the core purpose and values of the organization, and change everything else—practices, goals, and strategies—to stay relevant.”

That’s what the customers are doing, too. We’re not using computers, we’re doing genealogy—and computers are the tools of choice for most of us. We would change our practices, goals, and strategies, as well as our products, to follow our consistent purpose of learning about our families and communicating about them with others.

And as long as vendors and manufacturers help us serve our own purposes, we’ll continue to buy what they’re selling.