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Birnbaum looks back in regret
Many of the cutting-edge technologies now dominating emerging markets, from voice recognition to handheld PDAs, were on HP's drawing board 10 years ago, said Birnbaum, senior technical advisor to HP's CEO. But in an all-too familiar story, he said, the innovations failed to make it out of the lab. "It takes a very strong and very courageous manager to decide to abandon the revenue stream for something that's untested," Birnbaum said during his keynote address on technology transfer in Day 2 of dg.o2002. "This surely is the hardest, most frustrating problem, no matter how you define it, that researchers, technical people and managers face." A Yale-trained nuclear physicist, Birnbaum spent 15 years at IBM Yorktown, where he last served as Director of Computing Services. Jumping to HP in 1980, he worked as Senior VP for Research and Development, and Director of HP Laboratories, before retiring in February, 1999. His current post is as a consultant to CEO Carly Fiorini. "In 1983, HP had 1,500 people working on pervasive computing. That was once thought of as the edge of the lunatic fringe, now it's everybody's strategy," Birnbaum said. Birnbaum had a vision to combine HP's instruments with networked computing to make digital controls "part of everyday life for people ... I worked on this for 15 years, then I stopped ... because I never felt you could get squabblinhg manufacturers to agree on standards." Then came the "miracle" of the Mosaic browser and the World Wide Web. But when it came time to switch to Internet appliances, "they lost courage and we didn't do it. It wasn't because we didn't know about it, or hadn't had successes along the way." To illustrate the lost promise, Birnbaum screened a film clip, made shortly before the 1994 Northridge, Calif., earthquake, that displayed a number of technologies now reaching maturity: voice recognition, handheld translation devices, mobile video conferencing and digital cameras. HP failed to move ahead on most of them, but the videos served their purpose. "These were all things we were either working on or that we thought could happen," Birnbaum said. "These videos were expensive, they were corny, but they helped us to make product decisions."
But tech transfer has to be led from the top, Birnbaum added, by managers eager to celebrate failure, and reward risk. HP once developed a wireless eyeglass communication device, and (with Boeing) adapted it so it could be used by airliner crews to review plane manuals while in the field. The device was also made over as a wristwatch that could have plugged into airplane seats. "It worked great," Birnbaum said. "But the world has never seen these glasses, and I don't know if it ever will." |
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