Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech area. You know, it's time for a tech Stuff classic episode, folks, and this episode originally published on July twenty second, two thousand and fifteen. It is called disruptive technologies. Disruptive is an adjective that lots of folks like to use for businesses that often have no business plan. That at least has been my experience. But let's take a listen to the classic episode. The concept of disruptive technology. You hear it a lot, but often it is not very well explained and sometimes, in fact, often it is misused, uh just eruptive technology. Sometimes is being used just to mean something that has a lot of buzz around it, but doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be disruptive. The term itself is actually pretty specific. It was originally coined by Clayton M. Christensen in a book titled The Innovator's Dilemma, and specifically was talking about disruptive innovation, not just technology, but innovation in general. Because it doesn't have to be a physical thing. It could be a new way of going about doing something. And Christensen was saying that disruptive innovation was something that in business meant adopting techniques or developing technology that eventually completely surpasses or replaces previous approaches, possibly harming whatever business back the other older and in the long run, wrong technology. So I'd say a type of technology that disrupt an industry, sometimes completely changing the way stuff is done, sometimes completely invalidating long standing UH industries or business practices. So it's it's meant to be signify something that is really going to be transformative, not necessarily for the better. It doesn't mean that the disruptive technology is more powerful or more effective or more efficient. It might just be cheaper or easier to produce than the previous version. So here's an example. You might look at a ah, you know, something that was made by hand, like a handmade article of clothing versus a machine made article article of clothing. One is not necessarily better than the other just because it happens to be made in a different way. You could have handmade clothing that is superior to machine made clothing, but because the speed and the expense of using a machine can be much lower, or the speed is faster, but the expense is lower than if you were to rely on a human being to produce that piece of clothing. The sewing machine and other automated ways of creating garments end up pushing the the handmade version to a niche market. Now, you could argue that in cases like that, a person could still make a pretty decent living working by hand. It's just that the nature of the business has changed. In fact, you could argue that by marketing it as handmade, you could charge more for your product and thus make more money on a per product basis, and that could be very helpful. But the industry overall, the giant umbrella industry, has changed significantly. So I'm going to look at several different disruptive technologies. I'm pulling a lot of these from an r iCal that we have on how stuff Works dot com. If you don't remember how stuff works dot Com is my employer, Tech Stuff is part of how Stuff Works, and the article is ten disruptive technologies you use every day. Now, there's one that's not on the list that you certainly use frequently. You have to if you're listening to this podcast that I think merits special mention, and that is the Internet. The Internet is incredibly disruptive and that it has changed the way we do lots of stuff. It has enabled platforms to exist on top of it that have completely shaken up the way things used to work. Here's a you know, a simple example is shopping. You know, back in the day, you had to do one of two things. You ordered from a catalog, in which case you would go through a catalog, you'd fill out your order, you'd send it in, and then you would wait for stuff to be delivered to you, or you would have to go to an actual physical store and purchase things. I guess theoretically you could have a door to door salesman, so maybe there's three, but that that was pretty much your only choices, and then you were limited by the inventory of the physical space you went to. Uh you were you know, you had to actually make time out of your day to travel there. Uh. You had to expend a lot of energy just to get from point A to point being. These days, we can do a ton of our shopping online, never leave the comfort of our chair. Uh. The inventory is enormous because there are a lot of companies out there that either keep huge inventories or they can create on demand, depending upon whatever the thing is you're trying to buy. And so the Internet has really disrupted the shopping industry. You've got a lot of stores out there that are struggling to continue to make their numbers so that they can remain open. We've seen lots of different chains close over the last few years, bookstores being a big one. A lot of electronics store has have been having problems. That's indicative of the disruption we have seen from the Internet. And that's just one thing that the Internet has disrupted. Another could be long distance communications in general. The first one on our list in the on the side is email, and clearly email has been disruptive. It is changed the way we communicate with one another. We have this immediacy now. We no longer have the long delay between writing something and someone else receiving it and then responding because back in the old days, we would write letters and send those through the mail, and then we have to wait for the postal service to deliver our note. We have to wait for the person to read it, then write their own response, send it, and we have to wait to receive it. So communication was very different by its very nature. It had to be I mean, you couldn't be asking a question that you needed an answer, you know, within hours. That was not going to happen. But email has changed things dramatically. It's also kind of changed the nature of how we communicate. And you will hear people occasionally talk about how letter writing is now a lost art that people no longer know or bother to write letters in a way that they used to because email has supplanted. That has really changed the nature of communication. But emails cheaper, it's easier than handwriting a letter. There's no postage, there's no paper, there's no ink. Really, all you need is an internet connection. So whether you are paying for internet service or you're going someplace like the library, even to send a message, uh, you know, that's all you need really, and uh, of course it'll get to where it's going in moments, so if the other person is online, you could end up getting a response before you have a chance to navigate away from the email window. So it's very different. It has completely changed the nature of the postal service. Um, things like greeting cards and invitations, even those have started to decline. According to a two thousand eleven p Internet survey of adults in the US who got online used email them used it on a typical day of all Americans used email to some extent. That might even mean that we're communicating more. It may not be the same quality of communication, but the quantity certainly has gone up. And of course there's tons of other stuff that we send through email. So that's a good example of how the Internet has disrupted things. Beyond the shopping aspect, there are others as well. Social media, which is number nine on the list, also applies. Obviously, they are allowing us to have interactions with our friends and family, no matter how far apart they may be from us. Um you can share in for nation, not just through text, but you can share links, you can share videos or music, you can share photographs. You have this opportunity to have these interactions that before would have been limited to whenever you were with one another, or perhaps you had to rely on something like the snail mail service. So again, incredibly disruptive, and we've even seen this this pocket get shaken up multiple times as new players have incorporated different strategies and disrupted social media. So while social media has disrupted larger industries, social media itself has experienced disruption. A great example of that is my Space, which used to dominate the social media area, and then Facebook comes along and ends up becoming incredibly disruptive because of its appeal to a large young user base and grew from there, and my Space eventually collapsed in on itself and had to redefine itself and still is struggling to define itself as something relevant in today's social media landscape. We'll be back with more of this classic episode of tech stuff after this quick break. As of early more than half of the people who use the Internet also regularly used social media, not a big surprise. In the US that tends to be on the high end of the scale, so about as of January, and other nations it may be lower, but it shows that people are really you know, they've incorporated this into their lives. It's not just something that is occasionally used. I mean, I don't know about you, but I have Facebook open pretty much the entire time I'm sitting at any computer. And it may not be that I'm on Facebook the entire time solely, but it's always got a tab dedicated to it because this is how I tend to interact with my friends these days. We all are very busy, we all have schedules that pretty much prevent us from getting together on a regular basis. But this is a way I can maintain contact without having to, you know, put anyone to any trouble, which is nice now. It also, you could argue, is less satisfying than other means of interaction, like an actual physical get together where you can hang out and spend time with one another. And I don't argue that at all. Again, the disruption doesn't necessarily mean it's better. Sometimes just means it's easier or more effective in a way. So, uh, you know that, depending on your view of social media, you might see it as helpful disruption or very harmful disruption. There are a lot of other examples of disruptive technologies that have utilized the Internet, streaming media being a huge one. This is enormous. A few years ago I talked about how people would be increasingly moving away from cable and using the Internet to get access to various forms of entertainment. At the time, you know, it was it was an obvious move. Even when I I said it, but it was still something that was only occasionally talked about because I think, well, for one thing, the big media companies were a little worried about where things were going because they relied on old forms of media delivery to get their message across. So it's kind of scary to report on the potential decline of the industry you currently are in, But that is exactly what we've seen happen. We've seen cable subscriptions for cable television decline as we've seen people start to use other services online more frequently, things like Amazon or Hulu or Netflix to get their their their entertainment. We've also seen the growth of new forms of entertainment, things like YouTube, where people who are not part of a larger network are creating their own content and finding an audience. Uh that has become an incredibly powerful story where people who normally would not have had an opportunity to communicate through the Internet suddenly have this outlet. And not only do they have an outlet, but people find what they're saying to be valuable, whether that's entertainment or it's news or just personal opinion or whatever it may be. There's now this outlet that that did not exist before, and it's actually starting to take a big chunk out of the traditional media. Now, there's still a long way to go. You're gonna hear a lot of people talk about how this stuff is going to force the traditional media companies out of business, and in the long run, maybe that's going to be the case. I think it will probably even out where we're going to have a balance across multiple platforms. That's my own personal guests, but it certainly has proven itself to be a valuable way of getting to an audience. It's been effective and it's just going to continue to grow. The big challenge moving forward, I think for content creators is getting noticed because this space is getting more and more crowded. So it may turn out that until something else comes along and shakes up this industry, the streaming media industry, that you're going to have a few really big players in the space and then a whole bunch of little guys. And as someone who creates videos and uh and podcasts that are not part of how stuff works, I can tell you being one of those little guys, it's tough. I mean, it's tough to get noticed, but uh, Ultimately, it all depends on why you're doing it. If you're doing it for fun, like I do for my outside projects, it's not as big a deal because you just do it until it's no longer fun and then you stopped doing it. If you're doing it to make a living, then it's a much bigger deal. Obviously, you have to figure out how to reach that audience so that you can get paid. However that may be, whether it's through sponsorships or direct contributions through Patreon or something along those lines. But these streaming services have really created a new story that didn't exist just a few years ago. Back then, I mean, the only way you could end up getting on television if you didn't already have a job there was through like a public access station, or maybe if you went to college and they had a college television station, that was a way you could break into the industry. But otherwise it was pretty tough. So it's been amazing to watch this particular transition. Next on the list is e readers and e reader apps. Obviously one of the hallmark disruptive technologies to come along over the last decade. So e readers have been around for a while but it's only been you know, a few years since the first e paper uh devices really became affordable to the average person and paired with the right you know service like Amazon, And by right, I mean it makes it really super easy to get stuff onto that book. They've become powerful tools. So whether you like Amazon's business approach or not, it's impossible to deny their effectiveness Because you go out and buy a kindle, it is incredibly easy to purchase content for your kindle through the kindle. You know, you're buying it through Amazon, and that was their business model that makes incredible sense, the idea of selling this piece of hardware that makes it really easy for you to get intent and people are able to grab books and movies and music through Amazon and experience it through their various devices. It has been a huge blow not just too brick and mortar book companies, but publishers as well as music companies and film Honestly, home video clearly has taken a huge hit. Whether it's the brick and mortar retail stores where you would go and buy a DVD or Blu ray, or it's uh, you know, rental places. There are very few of those left around you've got Red Box and a couple of others. And here in Atlanta, we've got some independent companies that are still around that are really charming and have very eclectic collections. Video Drome in Atlanta. If you were ever in Atlanta and you want to see a real quirky, weird video rental place, go to Video Drome. UM. It's at the corner of Highland and North Avenue, and it is amazing. They have a lot of character. But obviously that business model, which used to be enormous, I mean, Blockbuster Video and other companies like it dominated various strip malls across the United States. You could not go very far without seeing another one, and these days they're long forgotten. Well, e readers UH and e readers and other devices, streaming devices and streaming media, as well as the shopping I was talking about earlier, have all contributed to seeing those kind of fade away. Smart mobile devices similar approach. It's also something that has really been disruptive. It's number six on the list. Uh. It was just a few years ago that everyone assumed that cell phones were just going to continue to get smaller and smaller in the future, because that was what was considered to be sexy, you would get a phone. The next model would be even smaller and more compact. There were lots of UH sketches on television, particularly starting that Live of characters who had comically tiny phones because it was a status symbol supposed to show how important that character was, or how important that character wanted to seem to be. And that was the joke, was that it was just going to continuously get smaller and smaller. UH. Smartphones turned that all around. So smartphones disrupted the phone, the mobile phone market because once the iPhone came out and showed that there was a compelling way to access things like the Internet through your phone, it meant that you wanted to have a screen that was of a large enough size for you to be able to read things and interact with it. And then we saw the trend start to reverse until now we're at the point where you start seeing the comically large phones, the fablets. I own one of those. I have a next to six. It's enormous, So that trend ended up reversing. We've also seen the they these devices have disrupted other industries, including e readers and tablets, and we've seen them disrupt some gaming industry too, because of the way that apps have reshaped the gaming landscape. You have gamers who are truly dedicated to specific consoles or two computers to PCs, and then you have others who are happy to play whatever on whichever platform. And mobile devices are incredibly handy because you almost always have one with you, and the experiences can be really satisfying depending upon the design of the app. Obviously, not all apps are created equal, but we've also seen smartphones replace other stuff, things like uh, day planners, which you might think, well, that's not that big a deal, but there are companies that just made day planners, or they made day planners as part of their business us, and there's less and less reason to go out and buy one of those. Or digital cameras. Back in the day, we used to have digital cameras as standalone devices because they took much better photos than our phones could. Phone images would be really low resolution, very grainy. But today we're seeing better and better sensors incorporated into phones, and I rarely carry around an extra camera. Sometimes I do in very specific circumstances, but most of the time I'm happy to just carry my phone. Same thing is true with MP three players. I used to be the person who wanted to have a n MP three player dedicated solely to MP three playing and that's it. But as phone uh storage got larger and larger, and as cloud storage began to become a thing, I stopped doing that. Cloud storage would be another great example not on the list here, but I'll talk about for a second. Cloud computing and cloud story in general, has been incredibly disruptive because by offloading the processing and storage requirements from a localized area to the cloud, you disrupt all the businesses that used to provide the machines that either processed information or stored it. So more and more companies are moving to cloud based services. It decreases the demand they have for powerful machinery on the front end, and it means they can make a lower investment. So in other words, the employees at a business might end up with cheaper laptops, but in the end it doesn't matter because the laptops aren't really doing all the work. A lot of the work is being offloaded to the cloud. So very disruptive. It also means it creates new opportunities if you're the one making those inexpensive laptops. You've got a powerful business now because of these other companies that have created these powerful cloud services. We've got more to say in this classic episod sort of tech stuff after these quick messages. Next on the list, we have mobile payment options. There's so many of these, Apple Pay being one that's in the news quite a bit, but there are other ones as well, things that end up taking the the the sting out of having to, you know, keep track of all your various cards, reward systems, things like that, all of that being wrapped up into an app that can keep track of everything for you. Very powerful, also extremely disruptive, really good example in this list. So there are a lot of different options here. I mean there's the Google Wallet, there's Apple Pay, there's into it go payment, There's lots of stuff out there. And this applies both on the user side and on the vendor side. You've got companies that are are using this stuff in order to be their point of sale, and it's really a great tool for them because they can end up offloading that and they don't have to invest in, you know, larger technologies like cashiers and things like that, or cash registers. I should say not cashiers, and uh, you know, we're seeing more of this sort of approach where you can do the tap and pay, and that ends up decreasing the need for sales personnel. Thus, this is a disruptive. It means that people who would normally be able to get a job doing that, being a sales representative at a retail establishment, they might find it harder to get that kind of job because there's less need for it. So sometimes disruptive can mean pretty tough consequences for people, at least in the short term, until you figure out some other place where you have a need that people can go and work at and fill that need. Plus they can go and you know, get pay aid for the work they do. So disruptive does not always mean great. It might mean great things for that whatever technology is just doing the disrupting, but it could have other consequences that roll out to lots of other people. Self checkout stations is similar in that way. It's also on the list. It's at number four. Very disruptive. Obviously, if you go to a grocery store and you see that there are only three lanes open, there's twenty lanes there three of them are open with with cashiers and the rest are are empty. And it's because these self service lanes have taken a lot of the load off. You don't need to employ as many people to handle the shopping requirements of your customers. I mean that's powerful, and again, just as I was saying with the other one, it means that it might put some folks out of a job. That's tough. Number three in the list is wearable fitness devices. This is interesting to me. Um, We're still kind of casting about for the perfect one. There are a lot on the market, and a lot of people have been testing out different ones, and companies keep coming out with new ones. And whether it's something simple like a fitbit, which is what I'm wearing right now, or it's more complicated like a smart watch that also has uh step tracking and maybe a heart monitor and other items that are related to fitness apps. Uh. They're everywhere and they are disruptive. Uh. They are also you know, really powerful in the sense of they raise awareness at least of fitness. Whether they actually drive fitness is still a matter of debate. I've seen studies that suggest that if you are already motivated, then you are likely to use these properly, but in that case, you're using it to help keep track of what you are already going to do. It's not like the fitness device encouraged you to do, you know, to be fit, but rather that it enabled you to keep better track of it. So it may be that these devices really just replace more simple devices like your standard pedometer, but still pretty disruptive. Uh. The last two on the list of I've actually already covered because there's cloud computing in the Internet. They are, uh, the number one and number two. Um, but I already mentioned though, so I'm not going to go through that again. There are a couple of others that are not on the list that I wanted to mention that I think have been that are either incredibly disruptive or have the potential to be really disruptive. One is the Internet of things. Obviously, the Internet of things, we've talked about it so many times, but just in case you're new to the program, you haven't heard about it, or or you're kind of confused, what does the Internet of things really mean? Internet of things ultimately refers to a world in which you have Internet connected sensors and actuators, things that can either take information from the environment or interact with the environment in some way, and they're all connected to the internet, uh in order to process information or send information. So here's an example. Let's use a house as our model, and you have you walk into your house, and you've got motion sensors that are connected to the internet. UM. They activate your lights and a sound system. When you walk in, the sound system plays from a playlist that you have selected, or maybe it even interacts by checking the information from a wearable you have on that detects your heart rate, and based on your heart rate, the house selects music that should complement your current mood based upon just the limited information it has. UH. Maybe it has information about what you had for dinner last night and has suggestions on things to eat tonight that might be interesting to you. These are all based on simple things that end up monitoring information, sending it to some other source where it gets processed, and then the processed information comes back to affect you in a meaningful way. Another great example would be traffic infrastructure. So let's say we have real time sensors out along the various roads of a busy city like Atlanta. It's a great example, and those sensors are picking up traffic patterns and sending it to a centralized processing station which is able to monitor the information and make useful conclusions such as, maybe it needs to adjust the timing on certain intersections so that traffic can flow more freely through there to alleviate some traffic congestion. It's of being a smart traffic system. Well, the Internet of things is like that, but imagine that with everything. So you might have an experience where when you step outside, the are very much tailored to your preferences or your current state of being, and so you it ideally would have a very wonderful experience wherever you went all the time, it was always going to be catered to you. The reality will probably be a little less science fiction Ee and Disney than that is. But we're already seeing examples of this, and so the Internet of things is going to be really disruptive as it makes regular tasks more efficient, more effortless, where we don't have to have middlemen to kind of negotiate things on our behalf, you know, we were able to have that stuff happen kind of automatically. Uh, that's going to be really disruptive. Um, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to put lots of people out of work, although I imagined that first at least some things, that will be the case. But it definitely means that it's going to change things. And again, it may not necessarily be better. It may just be that that's the easiest way to do things, and so it might not be better, it might be the way things are. The last one I would pick to talk about is autonomous cars. Autonomous cars are definitely going to be disruptive. They've already started to be disruptive, and they're not even something that consumers can get their hands on yet. Autonomous cars will be disruptive for multiple reasons. One of the big ones is that it will open up the potential for people to no longer own a personal vehicle. The idea here is that you could have a fleet of autonomous cars in a city. Let's say this would really only apply to folks who are living in urban environments for the most part. So imagine that you get a fleet of autonomous cars and they're on the street, driving very safely because they're relying upon high tech sensors that allow them to react in a tract and of the time it would take a human to react. So we've got these safe autonomous cars roving around. When you need to go somewhere, you use an app and say, hey, I need a ride, and one of these autonomous vehicles pulls up and you get in and it drives off. When an autonomous car needs to rest, like it needs to refuel or probably recharge, because I imagine that this is going to be largely an electric vehicle fleet, then it'll just take itself off the grid and another car would come online to replace it. And this would mean that you would travel whenever you needed it. But otherwise you know you did, you wouldn't need a vehicle, So people would not have to spend the money on a personal car. They could just rely on this service. Uh. You know. It's one of those things that has actually been bandied about as a possible business model. Uber is looking into it. There have been studies that have owned that such a model could potentially reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from cars by n Now keep in mind that car greenhouse gas emissions, that's a problem, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall greenhouse gas emissions that we see so clearly. If all of those cars, those electric vehicles are being powered by coal fired coal fired power plants, really you haven't you haven't really addressed the underlying problem, which is that you need to find some other means of generating electricity that does not dump out that many greenhouse gases in the process. It's always one of those issues where you gotta look at the bigger picture. But that autonomous approach could end up disrupting the automotive industry. If people don't need personal vehicles, then that's going to be a huge hit to multiple companies. Of course, any company that is the one that's actually supplying those autonomous fleets, they're gonna make it killing, but everyone else is going to have a real hard time of it. On top of that, things like taxi companies, they'll have a real hard time. I mean, it'll be a lot harder to get employment as a taxi driver if you have all these robot cars that are available and are really efficient, and you don't have to worry about a robot car having a weird conversation with you because it's just gonna take you to where you want to go, as opposed to you know, talking about some weird thing in the news or an odd personal problem that sometimes you get with taxi drivers. So it could be incredibly disruptive. Now, this is just a selection of disruptive technologies. There are tons of other ones that we could talk about. VR and a R, virtor reality and augmented reality. Another potentially disruptive technology, hollow lens in particular Microsoft's approach and Magic Leap being another could really disrupt things like if you can turn any surface into a monitor, you don't need to buy a monitor anymore. You just need the headset, and so there's a possibility that you could change these. You also could have a new means of interacting with your computer using voice and just your controls. If it's compelling enough and easy enough and versatile enough, that could be incredibly disruptive. We have seen the model of the PC to be largely unchanged since the early nineteen eighties. You know, you've got your keyboard and mouse, and that's the chief way you interact with computers these days. But it's possible that if you created a system that is easy enough to use and does what you needed to do, we could finally see that model fade away. Or at least end up competing with a different model. Uh. I don't know if that's necessarily going to happen. I haven't had my hands on a hollow lens yet, and there are probably going to be plenty of applications where you're going to think, no, I want a computer with a keyboard and a mouse to do this. It doesn't make sense for me to do it using this other model. But they're might be enough cases where the hollow lens could be truly disruptive and be the next or you know, not just the hollow lens, but augmented reality in general be truly disruptive and be the next step in how we interact with information. So that's another great example. There's tons of other ones obviously that have been in the news on and off, and I'm curious to hear what you guys think. I want to know what you think is the most interesting disruptive technology. And keep in mind, disruptive technologies are not a new thing. There have been disruptive technologies for as long as there's been technology. Great example is the printing press, very disruptive technology. It ended up disrupting all those monks who are illuminating scripts. Um so, this is something that has been around pretty much as long as technology has been around. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode about disruptive technologies. If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. You can let me know on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and how the tech area. You know, it's time for a tech Stuff classic episode, folks, and this episode originally published on July twenty second, two thousand and fifteen. It is called disruptive technologies. Disruptive is an adjective that lots of folks like to use for businesses that often have no business plan. That at least has been my experience. But let's take a listen to the classic episode. The concept of disruptive technology. You hear it a lot, but often it is not very well explained and sometimes, in fact, often it is misused, uh just eruptive technology. Sometimes is being used just to mean something that has a lot of buzz around it, but doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be disruptive. The term itself is actually pretty specific. It was originally coined by Clayton M. Christensen in a book titled The Innovator's Dilemma, and specifically was talking about disruptive innovation, not just technology, but innovation in general. Because it doesn't have to be a physical thing. It could be a new way of going about doing something. And Christensen was saying that disruptive innovation was something that in business meant adopting techniques or developing technology that eventually completely surpasses or replaces previous approaches, possibly harming whatever business back the other older and in the long run, wrong technology. So I'd say a type of technology that disrupt an industry, sometimes completely changing the way stuff is done, sometimes completely invalidating long standing UH industries or business practices. So it's it's meant to be signify something that is really going to be transformative, not necessarily for the better. It doesn't mean that the disruptive technology is more powerful or more effective or more efficient. It might just be cheaper or easier to produce than the previous version. So here's an example. You might look at a ah, you know, something that was made by hand, like a handmade article of clothing versus a machine made article article of clothing. One is not necessarily better than the other just because it happens to be made in a different way. You could have handmade clothing that is superior to machine made clothing, but because the speed and the expense of using a machine can be much lower, or the speed is faster, but the expense is lower than if you were to rely on a human being to produce that piece of clothing. The sewing machine and other automated ways of creating garments end up pushing the the handmade version to a niche market. Now, you could argue that in cases like that, a person could still make a pretty decent living working by hand. It's just that the nature of the business has changed. In fact, you could argue that by marketing it as handmade, you could charge more for your product and thus make more money on a per product basis, and that could be very helpful. But the industry overall, the giant umbrella industry, has changed significantly. So I'm going to look at several different disruptive technologies. I'm pulling a lot of these from an r iCal that we have on how stuff Works dot com. If you don't remember how stuff works dot Com is my employer, Tech Stuff is part of how Stuff Works, and the article is ten disruptive technologies you use every day. Now, there's one that's not on the list that you certainly use frequently. You have to if you're listening to this podcast that I think merits special mention, and that is the Internet. The Internet is incredibly disruptive and that it has changed the way we do lots of stuff. It has enabled platforms to exist on top of it that have completely shaken up the way things used to work. Here's a you know, a simple example is shopping. You know, back in the day, you had to do one of two things. You ordered from a catalog, in which case you would go through a catalog, you'd fill out your order, you'd send it in, and then you would wait for stuff to be delivered to you, or you would have to go to an actual physical store and purchase things. I guess theoretically you could have a door to door salesman, so maybe there's three, but that that was pretty much your only choices, and then you were limited by the inventory of the physical space you went to. Uh you were you know, you had to actually make time out of your day to travel there. Uh. You had to expend a lot of energy just to get from point A to point being. These days, we can do a ton of our shopping online, never leave the comfort of our chair. Uh. The inventory is enormous because there are a lot of companies out there that either keep huge inventories or they can create on demand, depending upon whatever the thing is you're trying to buy. And so the Internet has really disrupted the shopping industry. You've got a lot of stores out there that are struggling to continue to make their numbers so that they can remain open. We've seen lots of different chains close over the last few years, bookstores being a big one. A lot of electronics store has have been having problems. That's indicative of the disruption we have seen from the Internet. And that's just one thing that the Internet has disrupted. Another could be long distance communications in general. The first one on our list in the on the side is email, and clearly email has been disruptive. It is changed the way we communicate with one another. We have this immediacy now. We no longer have the long delay between writing something and someone else receiving it and then responding because back in the old days, we would write letters and send those through the mail, and then we have to wait for the postal service to deliver our note. We have to wait for the person to read it, then write their own response, send it, and we have to wait to receive it. So communication was very different by its very nature. It had to be I mean, you couldn't be asking a question that you needed an answer, you know, within hours. That was not going to happen. But email has changed things dramatically. It's also kind of changed the nature of how we communicate. And you will hear people occasionally talk about how letter writing is now a lost art that people no longer know or bother to write letters in a way that they used to because email has supplanted. That has really changed the nature of communication. But emails cheaper, it's easier than handwriting a letter. There's no postage, there's no paper, there's no ink. Really, all you need is an internet connection. So whether you are paying for internet service or you're going someplace like the library, even to send a message, uh, you know, that's all you need really, and uh, of course it'll get to where it's going in moments, so if the other person is online, you could end up getting a response before you have a chance to navigate away from the email window. So it's very different. It has completely changed the nature of the postal service. Um, things like greeting cards and invitations, even those have started to decline. According to a two thousand eleven p Internet survey of adults in the US who got online used email them used it on a typical day of all Americans used email to some extent. That might even mean that we're communicating more. It may not be the same quality of communication, but the quantity certainly has gone up. And of course there's tons of other stuff that we send through email. So that's a good example of how the Internet has disrupted things. Beyond the shopping aspect, there are others as well. Social media, which is number nine on the list, also applies. Obviously, they are allowing us to have interactions with our friends and family, no matter how far apart they may be from us. Um you can share in for nation, not just through text, but you can share links, you can share videos or music, you can share photographs. You have this opportunity to have these interactions that before would have been limited to whenever you were with one another, or perhaps you had to rely on something like the snail mail service. So again, incredibly disruptive, and we've even seen this this pocket get shaken up multiple times as new players have incorporated different strategies and disrupted social media. So while social media has disrupted larger industries, social media itself has experienced disruption. A great example of that is my Space, which used to dominate the social media area, and then Facebook comes along and ends up becoming incredibly disruptive because of its appeal to a large young user base and grew from there, and my Space eventually collapsed in on itself and had to redefine itself and still is struggling to define itself as something relevant in today's social media landscape. We'll be back with more of this classic episode of tech stuff after this quick break. As of early more than half of the people who use the Internet also regularly used social media, not a big surprise. In the US that tends to be on the high end of the scale, so about as of January, and other nations it may be lower, but it shows that people are really you know, they've incorporated this into their lives. It's not just something that is occasionally used. I mean, I don't know about you, but I have Facebook open pretty much the entire time I'm sitting at any computer. And it may not be that I'm on Facebook the entire time solely, but it's always got a tab dedicated to it because this is how I tend to interact with my friends these days. We all are very busy, we all have schedules that pretty much prevent us from getting together on a regular basis. But this is a way I can maintain contact without having to, you know, put anyone to any trouble, which is nice now. It also, you could argue, is less satisfying than other means of interaction, like an actual physical get together where you can hang out and spend time with one another. And I don't argue that at all. Again, the disruption doesn't necessarily mean it's better. Sometimes just means it's easier or more effective in a way. So, uh, you know that, depending on your view of social media, you might see it as helpful disruption or very harmful disruption. There are a lot of other examples of disruptive technologies that have utilized the Internet, streaming media being a huge one. This is enormous. A few years ago I talked about how people would be increasingly moving away from cable and using the Internet to get access to various forms of entertainment. At the time, you know, it was it was an obvious move. Even when I I said it, but it was still something that was only occasionally talked about because I think, well, for one thing, the big media companies were a little worried about where things were going because they relied on old forms of media delivery to get their message across. So it's kind of scary to report on the potential decline of the industry you currently are in, But that is exactly what we've seen happen. We've seen cable subscriptions for cable television decline as we've seen people start to use other services online more frequently, things like Amazon or Hulu or Netflix to get their their their entertainment. We've also seen the growth of new forms of entertainment, things like YouTube, where people who are not part of a larger network are creating their own content and finding an audience. Uh that has become an incredibly powerful story where people who normally would not have had an opportunity to communicate through the Internet suddenly have this outlet. And not only do they have an outlet, but people find what they're saying to be valuable, whether that's entertainment or it's news or just personal opinion or whatever it may be. There's now this outlet that that did not exist before, and it's actually starting to take a big chunk out of the traditional media. Now, there's still a long way to go. You're gonna hear a lot of people talk about how this stuff is going to force the traditional media companies out of business, and in the long run, maybe that's going to be the case. I think it will probably even out where we're going to have a balance across multiple platforms. That's my own personal guests, but it certainly has proven itself to be a valuable way of getting to an audience. It's been effective and it's just going to continue to grow. The big challenge moving forward, I think for content creators is getting noticed because this space is getting more and more crowded. So it may turn out that until something else comes along and shakes up this industry, the streaming media industry, that you're going to have a few really big players in the space and then a whole bunch of little guys. And as someone who creates videos and uh and podcasts that are not part of how stuff works, I can tell you being one of those little guys, it's tough. I mean, it's tough to get noticed, but uh, Ultimately, it all depends on why you're doing it. If you're doing it for fun, like I do for my outside projects, it's not as big a deal because you just do it until it's no longer fun and then you stopped doing it. If you're doing it to make a living, then it's a much bigger deal. Obviously, you have to figure out how to reach that audience so that you can get paid. However that may be, whether it's through sponsorships or direct contributions through Patreon or something along those lines. But these streaming services have really created a new story that didn't exist just a few years ago. Back then, I mean, the only way you could end up getting on television if you didn't already have a job there was through like a public access station, or maybe if you went to college and they had a college television station, that was a way you could break into the industry. But otherwise it was pretty tough. So it's been amazing to watch this particular transition. Next on the list is e readers and e reader apps. Obviously one of the hallmark disruptive technologies to come along over the last decade. So e readers have been around for a while but it's only been you know, a few years since the first e paper uh devices really became affordable to the average person and paired with the right you know service like Amazon, And by right, I mean it makes it really super easy to get stuff onto that book. They've become powerful tools. So whether you like Amazon's business approach or not, it's impossible to deny their effectiveness Because you go out and buy a kindle, it is incredibly easy to purchase content for your kindle through the kindle. You know, you're buying it through Amazon, and that was their business model that makes incredible sense, the idea of selling this piece of hardware that makes it really easy for you to get intent and people are able to grab books and movies and music through Amazon and experience it through their various devices. It has been a huge blow not just too brick and mortar book companies, but publishers as well as music companies and film Honestly, home video clearly has taken a huge hit. Whether it's the brick and mortar retail stores where you would go and buy a DVD or Blu ray, or it's uh, you know, rental places. There are very few of those left around you've got Red Box and a couple of others. And here in Atlanta, we've got some independent companies that are still around that are really charming and have very eclectic collections. Video Drome in Atlanta. If you were ever in Atlanta and you want to see a real quirky, weird video rental place, go to Video Drome. UM. It's at the corner of Highland and North Avenue, and it is amazing. They have a lot of character. But obviously that business model, which used to be enormous, I mean, Blockbuster Video and other companies like it dominated various strip malls across the United States. You could not go very far without seeing another one, and these days they're long forgotten. Well, e readers UH and e readers and other devices, streaming devices and streaming media, as well as the shopping I was talking about earlier, have all contributed to seeing those kind of fade away. Smart mobile devices similar approach. It's also something that has really been disruptive. It's number six on the list. Uh. It was just a few years ago that everyone assumed that cell phones were just going to continue to get smaller and smaller in the future, because that was what was considered to be sexy, you would get a phone. The next model would be even smaller and more compact. There were lots of UH sketches on television, particularly starting that Live of characters who had comically tiny phones because it was a status symbol supposed to show how important that character was, or how important that character wanted to seem to be. And that was the joke, was that it was just going to continuously get smaller and smaller. UH. Smartphones turned that all around. So smartphones disrupted the phone, the mobile phone market because once the iPhone came out and showed that there was a compelling way to access things like the Internet through your phone, it meant that you wanted to have a screen that was of a large enough size for you to be able to read things and interact with it. And then we saw the trend start to reverse until now we're at the point where you start seeing the comically large phones, the fablets. I own one of those. I have a next to six. It's enormous, So that trend ended up reversing. We've also seen the they these devices have disrupted other industries, including e readers and tablets, and we've seen them disrupt some gaming industry too, because of the way that apps have reshaped the gaming landscape. You have gamers who are truly dedicated to specific consoles or two computers to PCs, and then you have others who are happy to play whatever on whichever platform. And mobile devices are incredibly handy because you almost always have one with you, and the experiences can be really satisfying depending upon the design of the app. Obviously, not all apps are created equal, but we've also seen smartphones replace other stuff, things like uh, day planners, which you might think, well, that's not that big a deal, but there are companies that just made day planners, or they made day planners as part of their business us, and there's less and less reason to go out and buy one of those. Or digital cameras. Back in the day, we used to have digital cameras as standalone devices because they took much better photos than our phones could. Phone images would be really low resolution, very grainy. But today we're seeing better and better sensors incorporated into phones, and I rarely carry around an extra camera. Sometimes I do in very specific circumstances, but most of the time I'm happy to just carry my phone. Same thing is true with MP three players. I used to be the person who wanted to have a n MP three player dedicated solely to MP three playing and that's it. But as phone uh storage got larger and larger, and as cloud storage began to become a thing, I stopped doing that. Cloud storage would be another great example not on the list here, but I'll talk about for a second. Cloud computing and cloud story in general, has been incredibly disruptive because by offloading the processing and storage requirements from a localized area to the cloud, you disrupt all the businesses that used to provide the machines that either processed information or stored it. So more and more companies are moving to cloud based services. It decreases the demand they have for powerful machinery on the front end, and it means they can make a lower investment. So in other words, the employees at a business might end up with cheaper laptops, but in the end it doesn't matter because the laptops aren't really doing all the work. A lot of the work is being offloaded to the cloud. So very disruptive. It also means it creates new opportunities if you're the one making those inexpensive laptops. You've got a powerful business now because of these other companies that have created these powerful cloud services. We've got more to say in this classic episod sort of tech stuff after these quick messages. Next on the list, we have mobile payment options. There's so many of these, Apple Pay being one that's in the news quite a bit, but there are other ones as well, things that end up taking the the the sting out of having to, you know, keep track of all your various cards, reward systems, things like that, all of that being wrapped up into an app that can keep track of everything for you. Very powerful, also extremely disruptive, really good example in this list. So there are a lot of different options here. I mean there's the Google Wallet, there's Apple Pay, there's into it go payment, There's lots of stuff out there. And this applies both on the user side and on the vendor side. You've got companies that are are using this stuff in order to be their point of sale, and it's really a great tool for them because they can end up offloading that and they don't have to invest in, you know, larger technologies like cashiers and things like that, or cash registers. I should say not cashiers, and uh, you know, we're seeing more of this sort of approach where you can do the tap and pay, and that ends up decreasing the need for sales personnel. Thus, this is a disruptive. It means that people who would normally be able to get a job doing that, being a sales representative at a retail establishment, they might find it harder to get that kind of job because there's less need for it. So sometimes disruptive can mean pretty tough consequences for people, at least in the short term, until you figure out some other place where you have a need that people can go and work at and fill that need. Plus they can go and you know, get pay aid for the work they do. So disruptive does not always mean great. It might mean great things for that whatever technology is just doing the disrupting, but it could have other consequences that roll out to lots of other people. Self checkout stations is similar in that way. It's also on the list. It's at number four. Very disruptive. Obviously, if you go to a grocery store and you see that there are only three lanes open, there's twenty lanes there three of them are open with with cashiers and the rest are are empty. And it's because these self service lanes have taken a lot of the load off. You don't need to employ as many people to handle the shopping requirements of your customers. I mean that's powerful, and again, just as I was saying with the other one, it means that it might put some folks out of a job. That's tough. Number three in the list is wearable fitness devices. This is interesting to me. Um, We're still kind of casting about for the perfect one. There are a lot on the market, and a lot of people have been testing out different ones, and companies keep coming out with new ones. And whether it's something simple like a fitbit, which is what I'm wearing right now, or it's more complicated like a smart watch that also has uh step tracking and maybe a heart monitor and other items that are related to fitness apps. Uh. They're everywhere and they are disruptive. Uh. They are also you know, really powerful in the sense of they raise awareness at least of fitness. Whether they actually drive fitness is still a matter of debate. I've seen studies that suggest that if you are already motivated, then you are likely to use these properly, but in that case, you're using it to help keep track of what you are already going to do. It's not like the fitness device encouraged you to do, you know, to be fit, but rather that it enabled you to keep better track of it. So it may be that these devices really just replace more simple devices like your standard pedometer, but still pretty disruptive. Uh. The last two on the list of I've actually already covered because there's cloud computing in the Internet. They are, uh, the number one and number two. Um, but I already mentioned though, so I'm not going to go through that again. There are a couple of others that are not on the list that I wanted to mention that I think have been that are either incredibly disruptive or have the potential to be really disruptive. One is the Internet of things. Obviously, the Internet of things, we've talked about it so many times, but just in case you're new to the program, you haven't heard about it, or or you're kind of confused, what does the Internet of things really mean? Internet of things ultimately refers to a world in which you have Internet connected sensors and actuators, things that can either take information from the environment or interact with the environment in some way, and they're all connected to the internet, uh in order to process information or send information. So here's an example. Let's use a house as our model, and you have you walk into your house, and you've got motion sensors that are connected to the internet. UM. They activate your lights and a sound system. When you walk in, the sound system plays from a playlist that you have selected, or maybe it even interacts by checking the information from a wearable you have on that detects your heart rate, and based on your heart rate, the house selects music that should complement your current mood based upon just the limited information it has. UH. Maybe it has information about what you had for dinner last night and has suggestions on things to eat tonight that might be interesting to you. These are all based on simple things that end up monitoring information, sending it to some other source where it gets processed, and then the processed information comes back to affect you in a meaningful way. Another great example would be traffic infrastructure. So let's say we have real time sensors out along the various roads of a busy city like Atlanta. It's a great example, and those sensors are picking up traffic patterns and sending it to a centralized processing station which is able to monitor the information and make useful conclusions such as, maybe it needs to adjust the timing on certain intersections so that traffic can flow more freely through there to alleviate some traffic congestion. It's of being a smart traffic system. Well, the Internet of things is like that, but imagine that with everything. So you might have an experience where when you step outside, the are very much tailored to your preferences or your current state of being, and so you it ideally would have a very wonderful experience wherever you went all the time, it was always going to be catered to you. The reality will probably be a little less science fiction Ee and Disney than that is. But we're already seeing examples of this, and so the Internet of things is going to be really disruptive as it makes regular tasks more efficient, more effortless, where we don't have to have middlemen to kind of negotiate things on our behalf, you know, we were able to have that stuff happen kind of automatically. Uh, that's going to be really disruptive. Um, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to put lots of people out of work, although I imagined that first at least some things, that will be the case. But it definitely means that it's going to change things. And again, it may not necessarily be better. It may just be that that's the easiest way to do things, and so it might not be better, it might be the way things are. The last one I would pick to talk about is autonomous cars. Autonomous cars are definitely going to be disruptive. They've already started to be disruptive, and they're not even something that consumers can get their hands on yet. Autonomous cars will be disruptive for multiple reasons. One of the big ones is that it will open up the potential for people to no longer own a personal vehicle. The idea here is that you could have a fleet of autonomous cars in a city. Let's say this would really only apply to folks who are living in urban environments for the most part. So imagine that you get a fleet of autonomous cars and they're on the street, driving very safely because they're relying upon high tech sensors that allow them to react in a tract and of the time it would take a human to react. So we've got these safe autonomous cars roving around. When you need to go somewhere, you use an app and say, hey, I need a ride, and one of these autonomous vehicles pulls up and you get in and it drives off. When an autonomous car needs to rest, like it needs to refuel or probably recharge, because I imagine that this is going to be largely an electric vehicle fleet, then it'll just take itself off the grid and another car would come online to replace it. And this would mean that you would travel whenever you needed it. But otherwise you know you did, you wouldn't need a vehicle, So people would not have to spend the money on a personal car. They could just rely on this service. Uh. You know. It's one of those things that has actually been bandied about as a possible business model. Uber is looking into it. There have been studies that have owned that such a model could potentially reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from cars by n Now keep in mind that car greenhouse gas emissions, that's a problem, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall greenhouse gas emissions that we see so clearly. If all of those cars, those electric vehicles are being powered by coal fired coal fired power plants, really you haven't you haven't really addressed the underlying problem, which is that you need to find some other means of generating electricity that does not dump out that many greenhouse gases in the process. It's always one of those issues where you gotta look at the bigger picture. But that autonomous approach could end up disrupting the automotive industry. If people don't need personal vehicles, then that's going to be a huge hit to multiple companies. Of course, any company that is the one that's actually supplying those autonomous fleets, they're gonna make it killing, but everyone else is going to have a real hard time of it. On top of that, things like taxi companies, they'll have a real hard time. I mean, it'll be a lot harder to get employment as a taxi driver if you have all these robot cars that are available and are really efficient, and you don't have to worry about a robot car having a weird conversation with you because it's just gonna take you to where you want to go, as opposed to you know, talking about some weird thing in the news or an odd personal problem that sometimes you get with taxi drivers. So it could be incredibly disruptive. Now, this is just a selection of disruptive technologies. There are tons of other ones that we could talk about. VR and a R, virtor reality and augmented reality. Another potentially disruptive technology, hollow lens in particular Microsoft's approach and Magic Leap being another could really disrupt things like if you can turn any surface into a monitor, you don't need to buy a monitor anymore. You just need the headset, and so there's a possibility that you could change these. You also could have a new means of interacting with your computer using voice and just your controls. If it's compelling enough and easy enough and versatile enough, that could be incredibly disruptive. We have seen the model of the PC to be largely unchanged since the early nineteen eighties. You know, you've got your keyboard and mouse, and that's the chief way you interact with computers these days. But it's possible that if you created a system that is easy enough to use and does what you needed to do, we could finally see that model fade away. Or at least end up competing with a different model. Uh. I don't know if that's necessarily going to happen. I haven't had my hands on a hollow lens yet, and there are probably going to be plenty of applications where you're going to think, no, I want a computer with a keyboard and a mouse to do this. It doesn't make sense for me to do it using this other model. But they're might be enough cases where the hollow lens could be truly disruptive and be the next or you know, not just the hollow lens, but augmented reality in general be truly disruptive and be the next step in how we interact with information. So that's another great example. There's tons of other ones obviously that have been in the news on and off, and I'm curious to hear what you guys think. I want to know what you think is the most interesting disruptive technology. And keep in mind, disruptive technologies are not a new thing. There have been disruptive technologies for as long as there's been technology. Great example is the printing press, very disruptive technology. It ended up disrupting all those monks who are illuminating scripts. Um so, this is something that has been around pretty much as long as technology has been around. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode about disruptive technologies. If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. You can let me know on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.