The Next Big Thing

Punctuated Equilibrium Looking at the history of tech­ nological innovation, you begin to see a pattern. A technology is developed that changes how people live. Over a period of time, the technology remains essen­ tially the same, with perhaps a few minimal changes. Then, sud­ denly, somebody comes up with a radically different technology that quickly makes the previous tech­ nology obsolete. Evolutionary biologists call this punctuated equilibrium. The term was first used in a paper by Ste­ phen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge in 1972.1 Gould and Eldridge no­ ticed that, judging from the fossil record, species tended to exhibit little change over long periods of time and then to suddenly morph into something radically differ­ ent. In their paper, they referred to the long period without sig­ nificant change as “stasis” and the sudden change as a “morphologi­ cal discontinuity.” It’s not hard to see parallels in the technology world. Consider, for example, the telephone. For most of the 20th century, the telephone handset didn’t change much; eventually the rotary dial was replaced by a touchpad, and you could order a phone in colors other than black, but the functionality of the device remained much the same. Then, suddenly, toward the end of cen­ tury, the cell phone emerged. This new, invasive species quickly took over the habitat of the traditional landline telephone, and after cross­ breeding with the handheld com­ puter and wireless Internet, yet another species emerged—the smartphone. What causes these technologi­ cal leaps? Again, we can learn from the biologists. Changes in the environment can make life difficult for the old species and more favorable for the emerging species. Many paleontologists believe that a meteor impact 60 million years ago led to the ex­ tinction of the dinosaurs and the emergence of mammals. Simi­ larly, changes in the regulatory environment—specifically, the deregulation of the telephone industry in the 1980s—have con­ tributed to the decline of the landline telephone and rise of the mobile phone. However, not all emerging spe­ cies adapt successfully to a new environment. While humans, dogs, and cats have done well from an evolutionary standpoint, sabre­toothed tigers and mam­ moths have not—having long since gone extinct. Similarly, not all “next big thing” technologies have survived the test of time. Al­ though the cell phone has found its environmental niche, some of its contemporaries—like quad­ raphonic stereo, eight­track tapes, and citizens’ band radio—have been relegated to a dusty cor­ ner in the museum of forgotten technology.