If at First You Don’t Succeed…

I just watched the last episode of the last season of one of my favorite “quirky” TV shows, “Halt and Catch Fire.” It could have just as easily been called, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” The show ran for four seasons. The first season caught my attention because it was about the rapid evolution of the personal computer back in the early 1980s. The show’s opening season followed three people, each with unique skills, who came together to try to build a better personal computer. At the time, the IBM PC was king, but this small team of entrepreneurs collaborated to come up with a better design that they assumed would be able to beat IBM. The first season ended at a trade show where the Apple Macintosh was about to be released, and the team realized that their invention was going to be a bust. But they did not lose their hope to invent something that would change the world.

Each season had a similar theme; this small group trying to beat the odds and invent something that would revolutionize (disrupt?) the market. Of course, since no one watching TV just wants to see hardware and software engineers doing their thing, the show featured a lot of interpersonal interactions.

The last series of this show had the team working on a better way to find information on the newly emerging Internet. They figured that once Netscape saw the search product they had built, the company would incorporate it in their toolset and the team would finally find fame and fortune. But Yahoo! beat them to it.

If the series had not come to a conclusion, I could imagine that, next season, this small group of hotshot programmers and marketing visionaries would be trying to make advances in operational technology (OT) using edge computing, analytics and the ubiquitous IIoT. Of course, at the end of next season, they would have been beaten to the fame and fortune of building the best product for OT ever by (YOU FILL IN THE BLANK). But they would not have been discouraged and, in subsequent seasons, set out to come up with another great idea/dream to pursue.

I can’t help but think what a short first season they would have had, if the team had said “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home,” as Ken Olson, founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation did back in 1977 at the dawn of the PC revolution. Along similar lines, I suspect that somewhere out there, someone is saying something like, “There is no reason for open automation systems…”, or “Why would anyone ever want to use the Internet to connect to smart sensors?” Many organizations are trying to achieve these types of advances right now. Although not everyone can be the first, if the advances have the right reasons for owner-operators to buy them, then there is a winner somewhere out there to be found. So for the sake of progress, let’s all keep trying!