Читать книгу The Construction Technology Handbook - Hugh Seaton - Страница 13

It can seem that changes in technology are inevitable, and when looked at as a collection of solutions and products, there is some degree of truth in that. Science will keep producing new effects and insights we can leverage. Companies, driven by the designer to outcompete each other, will keep refining ways to exploit those effects.

But there is nothing inevitable about any given technology. We in the industry can absolutely affect what products are out there, and more importantly, how they work for us, and with us.

An example of this contrast between a kind of technology that was probably going to happen no matter what, and specific products that were very much not inevitable is the VHS/Beta battle in the 1980s.

Starting in the 1970s, film and TV were revolutionized by digital storage, which became video cassettes. There were two product options: Betamax and VHS. Beta was higher quality video, because its developer, Sony, assumed consumers would want to enjoy their movies and TV at the highest possible visual quality, which they achieved by limiting the playback to one hour. Panasonic's VHS, in contrast, provided lower visual quality but up to 2 hours in length when first introduced. Since most movies are over an hour, Beta didn't fit the market as well, and ended up losing the consumer market to VHS, which became the standard for about a decade.

Two things were at play – a standard and a product. In this case the consumer videocassette market became dominated by the VHS standard, and specific products were all VHS.

Prior to this, the only way to view a movie at home was when a broadcast network chose to air the movie, which they did rarely and in highly edited, kid‐friendly form. The home video market was thus “redomained” so that the way consumers viewed movies at home went from a broadcast‐centered model, to a videocassette‐centered model. The new domain was going to happen, but the specific products would win or lose based on how well they fit the market. And you, dear reader, are the market. You decide who wins or loses.

This matters more than it might seem, because when a new domain emerges, there are often a ton of options for a little while. Some of them fail, some get bought or merged with others, and a few will win. Everyone knows about Facebook, and some might remember MySpace. But do you remember Friendster and the 40 or so other social networks that came out in the mid‐2000s?

That's happening right now with construction project management software, where beginning in about 2015, more and more companies have set about digitizing the construction workflow – changing the technology domain from paper and Microsoft Excel, to unified platforms that deal with different parts of the construction process, or all of it. In time, there will be winners and losers – probably not the monopolies we see in consumer markets, but definitely fewer product offerings.

Redomaining can often come from other industries. Take building security, for example. The videocassette made possible an entirely new capability for the capture and storage of video from cameras in a building, cameras which themselves had been changed from film to digital in around the same 1980s' timeframe.

But in the later 1990s, content of all kinds, from music to video and images all began to convert into digital formats. These started as CDs, but then changed into MPEG video and MP3 audio. Around 2000, consumer markets started marketing players for these digital formats, which drove down the cost for digital storage for security, leading to today's systems that are entirely digital. In fact, systems like building security have seen a series of technological domain changes, from videocassettes, to CDs, to hard drives, to the cloud most recently.

It is often the case that developments in other markets, especially consumer markets, create pressure to change in other markets, because the technology becomes cheap and familiar to users.

These model changes, the redomaining, is going to happen no matter what. But the specific way it happens is not inevitable. This is an important lesson for technology in construction: pressures of technological advance mean that the construction process will continue to digitize, will continue to absorb and integrate new technologies, but any given company or product could succeed or fail. How to assess these products will be one of the key takeaways of this book, as we go through each of the technology areas that you will encounter.