Tech

Power: Mechanical, National, and Personal

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James Boswell is of course best known as the great biographer of Samuel Johnson. But Boswell didn’t spend all his time in Dr Johnson’s company. In 1776, he visited the Boulton & Watt steam engine factory. Showing Boswell around, Matthew Boulton summed up his business one simple phrase:

I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have–POWER.

Fast forward to 2009. In the United States as in Western Europe, politicians are conducting a vendetta against the energy industry. See for example this, which describes the closure of an aluminum smelter in Montana–because it can no longer obtain affordable electricity–and the probable exit of much of the nonferrous metals industry from Western Europe, for the same reason. (Link via MaxedOutMama)

So, was Matthew Boulton wrong? Have we finally found a group of humans–our present-day political leaders–who are NOT interested in power?

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Cool Retrotech

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I was vaguely aware of the Martin Mars, a very large seaplane built in the 1940s for the U.S. Navy…but had no idea that any of these airplanes were still flying in commercial service.

Turns out that two of these planes–the Hawaii Mars and the Philippine Mars–are in regular use as water bombers for forest-fire fighting. Tailspin Tom has a great set of photographs.

Via Neptunus Lex, who notes that the Mars is less a flying boat than a flying ship.

Entrepreneurship in Decline?

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Michael Malone has been writing about the technology industry, and particularly about Silicon Valley, for a couple of decades. This recent article is not very optimistic. Although Malone identifies several emerging technologies as having great potential, he fears that the basic mechanism by which new technologies are commercialized–the formation and growth of new enterprises–is badly broken.

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Retro-Reading

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It’s interesting to pick up a copy of a business magazine from 10 years ago or more and look at what was then hot and at the predictions that were being made–and how well they stood up with the passage of time.

Forbes ASAP (4/6/98) carried an article by George Gilder, in which he asserts that companies will increasingly compete by understanding that the customer’s time is a valuable resource–and making it possible to do business with them without wasting it.

The fact is that the entire economy is riddled with time-wasting routines and regimes that squander much of the time of the average customer. Suffice it to say that the concept of the customer’s life span as a crucially precious resource, indeed the most precious resource in the information economy, has not penetrated to many of the major business and governmental institutions in the United States, let alone overseas.

The message of the telecosm is that this era is over, as dead as slavery in 1865. These lingering attitudes in established busineses and government offer the largest opportunities for new companies and strategies in the information age.

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