Economics
Creative Destruction
You open your email and see a goodbye note from a product you used for years. A new tool took the work in half the time, so your team stopped renewing. The old vendor thanks you and says they are closing, and the support number will shut off next week. You feel a little bad, and then you notice how fast your week now moves. The hand crank you were turning is gone. A smoother device with a bright belt is doing the pull.
New ideas do not sit next to old ones. They bump into them and break them. The smartphone killed the point and shoot and the map in your glove box. Streaming took customers from DVD stores and then made them close. This feels harsh when you are on the losing side, but it is how productivity rises and prices fall. If you try to freeze the old machine, you also freeze the gains the new one would give.
Therefore
When you see a better tool, expect some breakage around it. Plan for the switch, and help the people and systems that will be left behind.
Steven Sasson, 1975
Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak, built the first digital camera in 1975. It weighed eight pounds, shot 0.01 megapixel images, and saved them to a cassette tape. He showed executives a TV playback and told them it would replace film one day. They told him to keep it quiet. Kodak kept making money on film for years, and digital sensors kept getting better. By the early 2000s, customers had moved. Film sales collapsed. In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection. The thing Kodak invented broke Kodak’s core business, and the company could not bear to let it happen.
A small reminder, on a laptop lid or a studio wall, that progress often arrives as a crack, and someone must choose to move through it.
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