Half-Life

2,000 years and still going strong…

The City of Turin had a pretty good thing going with the Shroud of Turin until 1988, when radioactive Carbon14 dating determined that the cloth dated from the 16th Century. No way this was the death shroud of Jesus.

There is a reason that the Saudis don’t allow archaeology in Mecca or Medina also.

What is interesting here is not the collapse of  a religious icon, but rather the Carbon14 dating system.  It’s based on the rather predictable radioactive clock of nuclear half-life degeneration.

Halflife is also referred to as exponential decay. It’s a very precise way to measure the rate at which nuclear material ages.  Here’s the formula if you want to argue:

Exactly…

To put it simply, in something like Carbon14 dating, it takes x years for half the Carbon14 atoms to turn to Carbon12, then another x years for another half, and so on. Pretty accurate, so I am told.

I think there is also a kind of half-life to technology and their offspring, and like Carbon14, it gets shorter with each iteration.

Newspapers were the first iteration of distributive journalism, and they were around for a good 150 years. Then came broadcasting, which first surfaced in the 1920s and is probably good for at least until 2020, so give it 100 years.  Internet distribution starts in 1980 and I think we can give that one 75 years or so.  See how it works? Half Life.

Look at recording.  Records, LPs and 78s first surfaced in the 1920s and were good until CDs came along in the 80s. A nice 60 year run.  But CDs were only good for 30 years, when they were replaced by iPods, which I think will be good for only 20 years, to be replaced by something else.

The time frame for collapse of each successive generation of new technologies gets shorter and shorter.  The same applies to businesses.

United States Steel was was good forever, or seemingly…..  General Motors, about 100 years, apparently.  But AOL? Hmmm… How about Yahoo? Are they finished yet? Not quite, but you can smell death stalking Yahoo.

I was particularly taken by this when I read about MySpace in the FT.

After paying $580 million for it in 2005, Rupert Murdoch finds himself with a fast depreciating asset.  Most MySpace users migrated over to Facebook. Why? Cleaner? Easier? Cooler?  Who knows. The most frightening thing here is that in fact, no one seems to really know.

And tomorrow, what is to say that Facebook users won’t migrate over to another site for an equally amorphous reason.

As a search engine, Google seems triumphant, but what is to prevent millions from migrating to another search engine tomorrow, one that gives more focused answers, for example. One that is ‘cooler’?  Who can explain cool? One day it’s Nehru shirts, the next day you wouldn’t be caught dead in them.  Zune, anyone?

As the numbers for Moore’s Law keep piling up larger and larger in each successive iteration of 18 month cycles, the rate of change keeps getting faster and faster.

Digital means that there are no longer barriers to entry.  100 years ago, if you dug iron ore out of the ground, you owned it. No one else was going to be able to create competitive iron ore by putting up a website Iron.tv.  And if you took that ore and built a steel mill to turn it into steel, you had another pretty good barrier to competition. Go ahead, build your own damned steel mill if you want.

Once, the owners of the NY Times might have said, ‘go ahead, build your own damned newspaper if you want to compete’. As Mr. Drudge, Ms. Huffington and thousands of others have discovered, it isn’t all that hard to do, once you no longer need presses and paper and ink and buildings

Soon businesses will be dead before they are even launched, made stagnant by yet another iteration of the same thing, only done better or cooler.

It’s difficult.

Imagine arriving at the River Rouge plant in 1903 and talking to Henry Ford as his first Model Ts rolled off the assembly line.

“It’s over Henry.  Ford stock is nearly worthless.”

But…. but… but…

“Sorry. T is no longer cool. Someone just came out with the Model U. Wrap it up. We’re done here.”