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Behind the bleeding edge NO.5

Behind the bleeding edge

¡¡¡¡MANKIND'S progress in developing new gizmos is often referred to as the "march of technology". That conjures up images of constant and relentless forward movement orchestrated with military precision. In reality, technological progress is rather less orderly. Some technologies do indeed improve at such a predictable pace that they obey simple formulae such as Moore's law, which acts as a battle plan for the semiconductor industry. Other technologies proceed by painful lurches-think of thirdª²generation mobile phones, or new versions of Microsoft Windows. And there are some cases, particularly in the developing world, when technological progress takes the form of a leapfrog.

¡¡¡¡Such leapfrogging involves adopting a new technology directly, and skipping over the earlier, inferior versions of it that came before. By far the bestª²known example is that of mobile phones in the developing world. Fixedª²line networks are poor or nonª²existent in many developing countries, so people have leapfrogged straight to mobile phones instead. The number of mobile phones now far outstrips the number of fixedª²line telephones in China, India and subª²Saharan Africa.

¡¡¡¡There are other examples. Incandescent light bulbs, introduced in the late 1870s, are slowly being displaced in the developed world by more energyª²efficient lightª²emitting diodes (LEDs), in applications from traffic lights to domestic lighting. LEDs could, however, have an even greater impact in parts of the developing world that lack mains power and electric lighting altogether. LEDs' greater energy efficiency makes it possible to run them from batteries charged by solar panels during the day.

¡¡¡¡Being behind the "bleeding edge" of technological development can sometimes be a good thing, in short. It means that early versions of a technology, which may be buggy, unreliable or otherwise inferior, can be avoided. America, for example, was the first country to adopt colour television, which explains why American television still looks so bad today: other countries came to the technology later and adopted technically superior standards.

¡¡¡¡The lesson to be drawn from all of this is that it is wrong to assume that developing countries will follow the same technological course as developed nations. Having skipped fixedª²line telephones, some parts of the world may well skip desktop computers in favour of portable devices, for example. Entire economies may even leapfrog from agriculture straight to highª²tech industries. That is what happened in Israel, which went from citrus farming to microchips; India, similarly, is doing its best to jump straight to a highª²tech service economy.

¡¡¡¡Those who anticipate and facilitate leapfrogging can prosper as a result. Those who fail to see it coming risk being jumped over. Kodak, for example, hit by the sudden rise of digital cameras in the developed world, wrongly assumed that it would still be able to sell oldª²fashioned film and film cameras in China instead. But the emerging Chinese middle classes leapfrogged straight to digital cameras-and even those are now outnumbered by camera phones.

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