Technology is always advancing. When a new technology is introduced to a market it is always a gamble whether it will see uptake or failure. When you consider some of the technologies that we have seen in the past, there are numerous examples of good technologies that the market did not want. Society chose VHS, not Betamax despite its being a superior technology. One technology that languished when it first entered the market but is now ubiquitous in uptake, is the barcode.
The first commercial barcode ever scanned was in 1974, a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum. This momentous occasion paved the way for an entirely new shopping system to be introduced. Today we don’t think twice about all the barcodes in the world but at the beginning, many doubted its success.
In the early days scanning machines were seen as too expensive. An article in 1976 declared them a failure. By that year only 50 stores had installed the system and without mass uptake the product was useless. Yet slowly, over time, more and more stores started to install the barcode system. The benefits were too good to ignore. Prices could be changed with ease and stock management became a much simpler task.
Today we stand at the crossroads of many new technologies. Artificial Intelligence, 3D printing, contactless payments, IoT, AR and VR devices and more. While many of these devices have been slow to uptake so far we should not consider them dead and buried just yet. For many of these technologies, it will take only one use case that everyone can understand, that they can see a clear benefit or cost saving from. Once this happens uptake will spike dramatically and the world will have changed yet again. Time will tell what technologies become failures and what become the successes of tomorrow but what can not be doubted is that ongoing innovation will continue to take place and that if we jump forward 30 years from now, the world will be a very different place.
