A little story illustrating the dangers of hype:
For Christmas 1984, my father bought a Compaq laptop computer for my stepmother. She was a reporter, and my father, an early technology adopter, wanted her to be able to file stories from home, the car, and our country house via telephone modem.
He spent almost $2,000 on the laptop, which he brought to me on Christmas Eve to set up. I had done some basic programming and had played with modems like the ones that Matthew Broderick used in “War Games.”
The problem was that neither my father nor the store clerk who’d sold him the computer knew that it needed software, particularly word processing and modem software, to function.
“Make it do something,” my father said eagerly.
“I can’t. There’s no software,” was my response.
“Then what can it do?” he asked, becoming concerned.
“I could write a basic program to make it say “Merry Christmas.”
“Do it!”
When I proudly showed him the result of my programming skills, in orange monochrome unicode text, he was thoroughly demoralized. “Can’t you make it look better?”
I understood his disappointment. The box the Compaq came in had a full color, exciting image on the screen–something that wouldn’t become a reality in consumer laptops for another ten years. The dream of plugging a LAN cable into a laptop onboard modem and connecting to a company-wide network, again, wouldn’t become standard for years. And yet that’s what he wanted. He could see what computers could do for productivity and lifestyle, but the industry–technology–wasn’t there yet.
When I look at technology company sites, promotional videos, software marketing brochures, all I see are sleek white plastic and metal skeleton androids getting ready to run a race or a happy retro 1950s robot solving problems for cartoon business owners.
These images are just like the image on the Compaq box. They represent an artist’s idea of what the software might do. The fact of the matter is often far less sexy.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s not important, or that you should ignore it.
As a consultant, my objective is to help small business owners like my dad, who want to improve and grow, and have a dream of doing things better and faster.
*the title of this post is a shout out to my Harvard classmate Farai Chideya’s excellent book Don’t Believe the Hype, addressing the serious issues of misrepresentation of statistics depicting the black community in the US political and news spheres.