I watched a few minutes of the Eurovision song contest last night... After the songs had been sung and onto the first votes. I couldn't really see what was going on with the trapezes and fire juggling, nor could I really follow the scoring very clearly... all I could get was an overall impression. Suddenly I realised... my world was being affected by "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", written by Lewis Carroll. He lived not 20 minutes down the road from where I live... I must have swallowed the "shrink me" potion and ended up seeing what Eurovision is like on my Nokia phone... I can get an overall impression but I don't frustrate myself by looking for details!
But it does make me think that maybe 3G is slow to invade my consciousness for the same reason. The providers are not realising that the Red Queen effect is in play:
“It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”
My latest Nokia phone seems to have ignored this effect by trying to slow me down!
The 7610 on the right enabled me (after microcode updates) to start exploiting a Lifeblog/Typepad/Flickr/QOOP ecology to improve my effectiveness. After a few years of playing in this sytem I decided that a better resolution camera might help me too, so I looked at what my provider culd do for me and they offered a move into 3G with a Noki 6233.. which has a better resolution camera and enables me to begin to understand the enabling infrastructure of 3G. When it arrives I find I am cut off from Lifeblog which screws me up... I've never made a call or taken a photo on the 6233, still using the 7610..and feeling uncomfortable about not adopting 3G. No matter, I like the design of the 7610 better so it also works better! So what is the platform in this ecosystem.. to me it is Lifeblog but to Nokia?
I found this reinterpretation of the Red Queen effect:
"Because the information component of products can change faster, it will change faster. Because information can be rapidly disseminated, it will be rapidly acquired by others. As a result, product life cycles will continue to shrink, and the pace of change will continue to accelerate."
Adaptive Enterprise, Stephan H. Haeckel
The interesting observation from the flashmovie, which is a simulation of innovation, Industry clockspeed and the Red Queen effect, is that a 10% increase in industry clockspeed per year means the rate doubles in 7 years... why is this important? Well to maintain revenues over time the innovation rate or more correctly the new product introduction rate has to go (in this simulation) from 1.4 to 3.6 innovations per year over the twenty year window of the movie. Which means if I am locked into Lifeblog to achieve my Red Queen antidotes then I need Nokia to sort out its platforms. Maybe my platform is Flickr or ? in which case I may feel I cannot wait for the price of an N95 to drop and I go elsewhere for to achieve the M>W>D effect I cannot "stay in the same place".
So maybe the Eurovision was really the Red Queen saying "sort it! Inertia will not do!"
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