To whom and how much should you keep up with the progress?



    In relation to history, optimists say that history teaches us not to step on the same rake again, and pessimists add that there are hopelessly many poorly trained people. I’ll try to be optimistic and retell the story that I heard from direct participants, and which happened in the late 1980s. in one of the leading Moscow research institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences. This story happened against the background of a well-known event: the appearance at the very end of 1987 of Windows 2.0-graphical shell for MS DOS.

    A less well-known event was the targeted allocation of almost a million dollars for the purchase of the then-latest IBM PC AT in the USSR Academy of Sciences. The research institute in question was commissioned to organize this procurement: to select a supplier and agree on a complete set. They bought not only hardware, but also software. All sorts of turbo C, turbo Prologs, turbo Pascals and AutoCADs were purchased sparingly based on one copy per institute. But DOS 3.3 and Windows 2.0 distributions were shipped with each PC in the form of a box of five-inch floppy disks and paper instructions. The research institute was large - there were almost 1000 scientists alone, and also pilot production with its design bureau and all kinds of services like accounting, planning department, human resources department, directorate, etc. So all this economy got almost a hundred PCs. Wishing, of course, was more. Therefore, when the Directorate created a commission which was to choose and provide the most worthy. That is, not those who the PC was going to use as a typewriter, playing Tetris during breaks, but those who had computing tasks that were relevant to the national economy. Just a few months after the distribution, the commission found out that no one was using Windows, and all floppy disks with the distribution kit were jammed to store their own data and programs (floppy disks, especially “bourgeois” ones, were in short supply).

    This was not surprising: on such a weak technique, the cumbersome Windows shell by that time looked like a saddle on a cow. Shells such as Norton Commander and QDOS were much more convenient. At the same time, it is worth noting the variety of tasks to be solved: someone processed the results of the experiment, and someone modeled, then printed a scientific article, an application for discovery or invention, prepared a dissertation, made design documentation in the design bureau, worked in accounting, planning department and in the directorate traditional work for these departments. Only a few years passed, and the same people who rubbed Windows 2.0, already on other newer PCs, they were working hard at Windows-95, and then under Windows-98, etc. And this is not surprising either, since from an inconvenient shell Windows turned into a relatively convenient OS.

    What does this story teach us? I think that it is a good illustration of the seemingly obvious fact that not every innovation is immediately convenient and useful. A large and successful commercial company, of course, needs to keep pace with progress by all means, and reasonable costs for solutions that are not yet successful, but potentially progressive, are vital for such a company. Something will pay off so much that it will pay off everything else that does not live up to expectations. But in this case, probably, it was not worth putting Windows 2.0 on every workplace. Buy one copy and instruct two or three employees to deal with it. To all the others - even large research institutes - too much to keep up with the progress may be too much and not justified. Often, it’s worth the wait a few years, until the innovation has fully established itself.

    It would seem that all these conclusions can be reached, and not resorting to examples such as early versions of Windows, but using only common sense. However, the so-called culture of a consumer society makes a significant destructive contribution to people's minds. For example, many are willing to spend considerable money changing gadgets at least every month, not because the gadget has broken or become uncomfortable, but only because another new model has appeared. At the same time, “gadget” means everything: from a car to a mobile phone, a kitchen pan and software. Such sentiments are often manifested even on Habré, where there are a lot of participants wise by experience: it is worth saying that you have an old version of something, then someone will not fail to call you at best a conservative.

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