The Speed of Innovation

Had a great conversation this weekend with my father in law about the speed of innovation. Much of the discussion circled around the Google Glass project as it's starting to feel like 2050 instead of 2012. The realization is that technology innovation is slowing accelerating not at a linear pace but more of an exponential one.

The most important thing to ask yourself is why this is happening and what it means in terms of the work you do. First, it's mainly has to do advancements in the underlying hardware that allows for a lot of these leaps in how we interact with computers and giving the processing power we need to pull of augmented reality and the like. Moore's Law has done an amazing job at predicting the speed of CPU speed but it's also probably a reflection of the speed applications can be delivered. There are some who are predicting programmers double there speed of programming every 6 years due to the advancement of languages, systems and tools. However, if that curve continues that means both the rate of application development and the value of programmers will continue to accelerate.

Overall, I'm very optimistic if this type of acceleration is truly happening. However, it does mean that your great business might quickly become obsolete faster than ever, competitive advantages that once existed will be gone and you'll end up paying a lot more for programming development.