Other candidates for “could have taken over the world?”

1) IBM, back in the days when it was THE computer manufacturer. Similarly, Apple Computer could have ended up with a Microsoft-like domination of the home computer market, but they lost out to the IBM compatible machine that ran Microsoft’s version of DOS. And speaking of Microsoft, haven’t they pretty taken over the world already? Imagine what a James Bond villain do with a few back doors into the Windows operating system…

2) AT&T, back when it had full control over its phone lines, to the extent that it was illegal in the U.S. to connect a non-AT&T phone to their telephone network.

3) 19th century energy companies. Today, you need electricity to do pretty much anything – could people back in the era of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla leveraged that into a Take Over The World scenario? I’ve made half-joking remarks about the Singularity having occurred in 1876, when Thomas Edison invented the industrial research laboratory, but there really is a grain of truth to it.

Apple has often managed to force new hardware standards on the world by deciding at just the right time this is a better way to do things; if you try it you’ll be more productive. (Machines with no floppy drive, pen-based PDAs, multitouch input phones and many other moves all had their skeptics). On the other side, Microsoft has often managed to sell monolithic this does everything application suites that aren’t quite as good for some purposes as specific specialized apps from different vendors. So it’s not inconceivable that someone could have sold the world a monolithic application requiring multiple new interface methods. But the limiting factor on doing this isn’t foresight. There’s also marketing, luck, timing, persistence, charisma, design talent, development talent, managerial ability and more. It would be quite a coincidence if one small group at SRI had excelled in all of those at once and my sense of it is that general business savvy was a weak point.

(Ubertool == Capitalism), except without the inefficiencies of communism implicit in having all of capitalism run under a single company with no price structure. Get it?

Wasn’t this a perfect storm for a tool takeoff scenario?
By a single collective entity? No, that would be the U.S.S.R during the communist era. They were by far the single collective entity with the most tools. They were making tools to make other tools. Machinery doesn’t get made with sticks and stones. So they were following the model.

What odds would have been reasonable to assign to Doug’s team “taking over the world”?
Pretty close to zero, if pitted against a bunch of other companies working on a free market model.

But if you are talking about influence as passed on by the memes he created, then It can be argued that Engelbart’s vision did take over the world, he just didn’t position himself financially to capture the wealth created, other organizations did that.

Arguably I never made any revolutionary contributions of my own but I was an active observer and have some warranted observations about these questions.

First, I did think at the time that Englebart’s, Alan Kay’s, and Xanadu’s visions (and to a lesser degree the technical contributions by Englebart and Kay, but not Xanadu) had revolutionary potential. That was why I spent time with them. My expectations more or less fit the later reality. So at least some revolutionary ideas are recognizable at the time.

Second I didn’t see the implications of other even more revolutionary things I was exposed to. I was there when the second IMP was installed in 1969 but didn’t intuit the implications of the internet. I did figure out implications of cheap local networks in the mid-1970s but didn’t see the social implications of the internet until we got early Mosaic demos at Apple. Etc. Furthermore except possibly for Paul Baran in one RAND report, nobody really laid out any vision of a networked society before the early 1980s. Even Baran (and Vinge, Gibson, etc.) missed most of the impact.

So some really huge implications are hard for anyone to see much in advance.

Most important for Robin’s question, in the projects I’ve seen, almost none of the actual value was “internalized”.

• SRI and Englebart didn’t create the products that generated value from Englebart’s ideas.
• Xerox and Kay didn’t create the products that generated value from the Xerox PARC ideas (though Xerox tried, and arguably thereby retarded the wider impact of those ideas with IP encrustations).
• The Xanadu project failed partly because it was so successful at keeping all its IP secret, so it got no external adoption, help, or constructive criticism (all of which it desperately needed).

My conclusion from all this is that no single organization or project could succeed the way Robin describes. I agree with other comments that the larger network of innovation is required — complementary innovations, variants that work better, translation into important niches or applications, etc.

In fact all my observations indicate that if innovations are kept secret or their IP is fully protected, it usually kills them. The only exceptions I’m aware of is when they are very self-contained “point technologies” like xerography or the vulcanization of rubber.

The opposite examples are the internet and the web, both of which succeeded partly because their IP was all completely open, and their development was broadly collaborative. If they had been owned and protected, say by telecom companies, we would not have seen anything like the current social value they generate.

There is also the productivity paradox that economists observed in the 1980s. In spite of huge investments in IT, economists weren’t seeing productivity improvements among white-collar workers. It took a while for white-collar workers to figure out how the new tools could make them more productive.

I think that for a tech to take over the world it has to be generally applicable across many fields. And unfortunately the more general something is, the more pie in the sky it will sound to an investor.

AI is obviously the height of generality, so it does have the potential for world dominance. But Engelbart was on to something too.

He realized that even though companies perform different specialities, and they improve their techniques differently, they could all improve their technique-improvement process the same way. He realized that at the meta-meta level everyone unifies. In that sense he too was being general enough to take over the world (or at least all companies). He didn’t because his hypertext/wiki ideas probably weren’t enough, but the identification of that unification alone deserves props.