Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Dishwashers adopt slower than radios
Adoption curves
A researcher who used to work with Clayton Christensen was commissioned to chart the big adoption curves of the last 100 years. Radio is one of the fastest ever. Many factors set the pace of adoption, and a modern, fast-moving world does not make every curve steep.
Business software's drag
Business software behaves like the dishwasher. It has to be plugged into existing systems, so B2B products can take a long time to spread, and consumer products generally go much faster. B2B internet in the late 1990s had a huge bull case, but the underlying infrastructure wasn't in place, and it happened about 20 years later as SaaS. Cloud had its own plug-in problem, since everyone feared that data in the cloud was unsecure until the CIA and Capital One moved there. Cloud growth ran about 30 to 40, maybe 50, percent a year.
AI's shortcut
AI skips most of that, at least for consumers and often for business: you open the browser and it's there. That is why its adoption has gone straight up, a shape called a backwards L curve. The slower part is big companies, which are security conscious and can be slow to move, and where a few evangelists have to push AI through while IT calls it risky.
Why did radio spread so fast?
Radio needed little beyond a receiver and a power source, and the broadcaster, not the listener, carried the cost of content. The first commercial station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, began broadcasting in 1920. The US Census counted radios in about 40 percent of households in 1930 and more than 80 percent in 1940.
Why did dishwashers spread slowly?
A dishwasher needs a water supply, a drain, hot water, and electricity, all built into the house. Josephine Cochrane patented a workable machine in 1886, and early buyers were mostly hotels and restaurants. Homes had to be built or remodeled around the appliance. It took well over a century for dishwashers to reach most American households.
How does an adoption curve get its stages?
Sociologist Everett Rogers described the stages in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, based on studies of farmers adopting new seed. He split adopters into innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and laggards. His proportions were 2.5 percent, 13.5 percent, 34 percent, 34 percent, and 16 percent. Plotted over time, those groups trace the S shape.
Why did cloud security fears fade?
Early cloud meant sensitive data sat on hardware owned by someone else and shared with other customers, which risk officers and regulators distrusted. Amazon Web Services won a cloud contract with the CIA in 2013, reported at about $600 million. Capital One announced in 2015 that it was moving to AWS, and the bank said in 2020 that it had closed its last data center.
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