Digital village: the cost of having analog executives in a digital world

T his quote is attributed to Thomas J. Watson, Sr., on the occasion of the opening of a new IBM laboratory in 1932. Few would disagree with the need for sound and accurate technology forecasting in any organization that seeks to remain competitive. However, there is little evidence that the full ramifications of this observation are consistently understood or widely implemented. Watson’s advice may be falling on deaf ears—and this will become even more of a problem as we begin a new millennium in which network and distributed processing environments will be even more unforgiving of technological blunders. Many years ago, a senior IBMer told me that Watson, Sr., founded the Yorktown Heights research center primarily as a means to avoid technological surprises, and only secondarily as a leading research center. In a sense, this same theme was behind the Manhattan Project, the original goal of which was to prove it was impossible to make an atomic bomb—in this case the reductio ad absurdum approach literally backfired. How-