30th June at 19:59

On this morning's early walk I listened to Carlota Perez talk to Mik Kersten on his podcast.

Carlota talks about how we get to the Golden Age of Software, learning from the history of the "five great surges of technical change":

1. industrial revolution
2. railways
3. iron
4. heavy engineering
5. automobile

and how each revolution has gone through 3 distinct phases:

1. installation - with characterists like booms, busts, disruption, madness, lots of money being pumped in
2. turning point - bubbles burst, problems emerge like inequality, wars, creative disruption
3. golden age - possibilities of the technologies are applied across economies and every section of society benefit

I love the idea of a future where we shift to a services econonomy based on maintaining the things we have. Planned obsolescence has had its day and a lot of people have grown tired of owning the latest gadgets. We now have the need (tackling climate change) and the technical advances to switch from owning products to renting services. This is starting to happen already.

Rolls Royce no longer sells the airplane engines. They now rent the service of the engine so that they go fix it and they make sure they're constantly taking care of the engines that continue to belong to Rolls Royce and are being used by the airplanes and then fix them.

Can we apply this thinking to software itself to overcome the problems of toxic technology? With the advent of cloud, we have the as-a-service paradigm. However, we must still glue these things together and deal with the dynamic parts. Engineering is still important, e.g. modularity, separation of concerns, abstraction and cohesion, even as the barrier to entry is lowered with movements such as low code.

Anyway, I digress. To learn more, read Carlota's series of articles on her comparison of her own version of past technical revolutions with another perspective on periodisation of technical history.