Who and how much to keep pace with progress?

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



A less well-known event was the targeted allocation of nearly a million dollars for the purchase of the latest IBM PC AT computers at the USSR Academy of Sciences. The scientific research institute about which speech, has been entrusted to organize this purchase: to choose the supplier and to agree about a complete set. We bought not only hardware, but also software. All kinds of turbo C, turbo prologues, turbo Pascals and Autocadas purchased economically at the rate of one copy per institute. But the DOS 3.3 and Windows 2.0 distributions were supplied with each PC in the form of a box of five-inch floppy disks and paper instructions. The scientific research institute was large — there were almost 1000 scientific workers alone, and still pilot production with its design bureau and all kinds of services like accounting, planning, personnel, management, etc. So all this farm got almost a hundred PCs. Wishing, of course, was more. Therefore, when the Directorate created a commission that was supposed to select and provide the most worthy. That is, not those who wanted to use a PC as a typewriter, playing during breaks in Tetris, but those who had computing tasks relevant to the national economy. Just a few months after the distribution, the commission found out that no one was using Windows, and all the diskettes with the distribution kit were erased to store their own data and programs (the diskettes, especially the “bourgeois” ones, were in short supply).



This was not surprising: on such a weak technique, the bulky Windows shell looked like a saddle on a cow by then. Shells like 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, designed a dissertation, did design documentation in the design bureau, did the accounting in the planning department and traditional work for these departments. Only a few years passed, and the same people who rubbed Windows 2.0 already worked on Windows-95 on other newer PCs, and then on Windows-98, etc. And this is also not surprising, since from an inconvenient Windows shell turned into a relatively convenient OS.

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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 up with the progress by all means, and reasonable costs for albeit not yet successful, but potentially progressive solutions, are vital for such a company. Something will pay off so much that it will pay for everything else that has not met expectations. But in this case, probably, it was not worthwhile to put Windows 2.0 on every workplace. Buy one copy and instruct it to deal with two or three employees. All others - even large scientific research institutes - may not keep up with progress too far and cannot be justified. Often it is worth waiting for several years, until innovation finally recommends itself.



It would seem that all of these conclusions can be reached, and without resorting to examples such as early versions of Windows, but using only common sense. However, the so-called culture of the consumer society makes a significant destructive contribution to the consciousness of people. For example, many are willing to spend a lot of money, changing gadgets at least every month, not because the gadget broke down or became inconvenient, but only because a new model appeared. In this case, the "gadget" means everything: from the car to the mobile phone, kitchen pan and software. Such sentiments are often manifested even in Habré, where there are a lot of experienced participants: it’s worth saying that you have an old version of something, then someone will not fail to call you at best a conservative.