Technology Manifesto, Part 1

In 1981, at the age of 7, I was a pretty normal small town kid. My family was in a little house in Yakima on McLean Drive, just up the street from the creek (pronounced ‘crick’) where my brother and I would fish for perch. I might have grown up like Huck Finn, if not for one day.

You see, on that day, my dad brought home a Timex Sinclair ZX81, a weird little device with a membrane touchpad glued on the top. We took it out of its box, attached its tape drive, the sort that took a normal cassette by the way, and hooked it up to this weird little monitor that was made for “computers.” Not that I knew what a computer was, but I was ready for a new challenge and since it came with a book on “programming the Timex Sinclair” it sounded like it might be fun. I don’t think I caught a perch ever again, I was hooked.

What was it that so captured me? The endless possibility of what a computer could do. It might not be something you stop to think about in your daily life but consider: what would the business world be like if the computer never caught on? I actually had a COO (that’s Chief Operating Officer to those not TLA savvy) during my nearly eight years at Amazon.com that wanted to turn off the email system in favor of unlimited voicemail. Think about that one for a second, Amazon.com the tech giant, turning off email for voicemail…needless to say, that COO didn’t last long. But that is the nature of things with technology; there is a relentless march forward and to stand still is to really fall into irrelevance.

So again I ask, why has the computer (speaking generally) become the largest change agent in the world in the last 30 years aside from Jesus? I would argue that it has become so integral into the life of any worker because it solves problems. Seems pretty obvious, right? You had read this far and were hoping for a little more, well, sometimes you get what you pay for and this is free.

1. Technology Exists to Solve Problems

This principle, that technology exists to solve problems is the first tenet of Mars Hill Technology.

Of course, one of our more common experiences in daily life is that Technology causes problems. Whether its a cryptic error message on a printer ‘PC LOAD LETTER’, or the Blue Screen of Death when your Windows machine crashes (they do that alot by the way), either way, technology is preventing you from getting your work done.

There are alot of corollaries to Principle #1, but we’ll save that for future episodes, so stay tuned, subscribe to this RSS, and tell your friends.