Media

A Little Perspective on Technology: The Versateller, the Cell Phone, Hybrids, and the IPhone.

It never ceases to amaze me to consider the collective power of individuals as consumers as they go about their lives, spending their money, and using devices and appliances, which serve to “innovate” them. (Which is synonymous with “speeding up”.) When people decide to buy something en masse, markets change, companies adjust their marketing, governments change tax and municipal, and even adjustments to international policies have been made to adhere to these human and consumer behaviors.  The technology movement has resulted in changes in society as a whole.

In my lifetime and career, I can name a handful of these “sea changes” that have swept through my personal and business world without even trying to recall them. I’ll name a few of these and pose the question, “When is the next BIG thing?”  

The first innovation that had major impact, once I got out into the working world, was the electronic delivery of ‘cash spending money’. It’s hard to imagine a time when you could not find cash at a moment’s notice, but this has not always been a prevalent convenience. And it was not too long ago, when if you forgot to go to the bank, you were stuck without cash for an entire weekend. Now there are a multitude of locations, both bank and non-bank, that allow access to your accounts around the clock, and around the world. I think this innovation not only represented a major time-saver to people who had better things to do than wait in line at the bank, or couldn’t get away from work, but literally had the effect of increasing the velocity of spending in the U.S. economy. Credit cards had already served to do the same thing, within that ten year period, with major bank marketing plans and the Visa international company rising to a powerful level, so credit access for the masses went into turbo mode, during roughly the same period.

My best estimate to pinpoint the actual date of this epic movement in cash delivery was in the early eighties. I was completing my first training and indoctrination course out of college, running operations at the San Francisco branch of Bank of America in the Marina District.  That particular branch is now a Blockbuster video store, and a bank of ATM’s now represents the branch.  That is the inflection point for this segment of the story. The year is 1983, and automated teller machines were being rolled out with the fanfare similar to Hybrid cars have recently. Customers asked, “What are they, really? How do they work? Is it going to mess up my account? Is it going to complicate, or simplify, my life?”

All of these questions were met with curiosity and then enthusiasm, as a small sidewalk construction site yielded to what looked like a television mounted in a kiosk, with a keyboard nearby. Behind it, from the bank employee operational side, a cinder-block room with serious-looking vault-like doors were ostentatiously placed near the front door of the branch, and I can remember the serious look I forced myself to have, as a 24-year-old rookie banker, under the protection of “double custody”; my associate and I walked $100,000 in “blocks” of bills concealed in a conspicuous canvas bag, across the branch, to this secluded room where we counted every single note, because we were responsible for every twenty dollar bill. Fast forward to now, where “service teams” with millions of dollars in stacked twenties, stock ATM machines round the clock in bank regions to keep up with the pace. At that time, we stacked the bills into the cantankerous machines, hoping they would be dispensed on the other side accurately, and orderly. Often, they did not. 

More memorable were the public reactions to this new “convenience” which met with the  “it will never work,” to a mob of users who were suddenly more proud to be Bank of America-affiliated. Some of these customers wanted to be seen, pulling over to the side of the road with their Porsche’s and BMW’s on their way home to Pacific Heights for Marin County, to be recognized or noted as “progressives” and willing inductees into the world of technology. People would look around before inserting their card… and most of them had their “password” written on a piece of paper in their wallet, because NOBODY needed “passwords” back then. What would you need one for? People used “keys” back then to open things! Now you need a code to open everything: your car, your front door, computer, phone, etc.

I need to put this scene into context: this is the “eighties”. Some of you will be amazed at the inflection point of this time period in the early 1980’s. To point: cellular phones were called “bag phones” because they were the size of a shoebox, and only FBI agents and top executives, and millionaire salespeople deemed them necessary. The personal computer was not in general use. Silicon Valley was not a commonly used term. The laptop was a dream. Wallets carried cash, and maybe a single credit card.

ATM’s were simply called “Versatellers”, Bank of America’s copyrighted, trademarked name, and like the stinky copies of the 1960’s that were called “Xerox copies”, ATM’s became affiliated with Bank of America, and “Versateller” became ubiquitous in conversations about the cash dispensers. In those days, BofA initiated a competition for the most ATM locations. I remember that those were the days when every single town in California had a bank branch, too; whether it was Barstow, Yreka or Willits, and the bricks and mortar strategy led to between 900 and 1000 of them in 1983. (That was a question I had to know for customer service reasons, so I was sure to remember it forever.)

So fast-forward to now. Reductions in actual buildings followed the zillion-branch strategy. Many small towns don’t have bank branches of any type. The convenience store likely has a cash machine, with a footprint of a vacuum cleaner, over in the corner by the magazines. Most people just swipe and run, with their potato chips or coffee. Now there’s a Starbucks in every town, instead. Remember, we are talking about speed and efficiency in this piece.

The next big thing has been cellular telephones. I could go on for hours about this one, but we all know that William Shatner’s Star-Trek “communicator” was a fantasy at that time, although mobile communicating wasn’t a problem, we just never thought it would size down to a deck of cards or wristwatch size. We also didn’t imagine that voice conversations would be joined by the need for written messages and the transfer of video and photographs to our very person regardless if we were at the top of a ski lift or sailing off the coast of Santa Barbara…nor did we think it would be important to receive and send these messages for anyone other than the captain and his officers of the Starfleet. How about ten-year old girls at a mall? To report junior’s first hit in tee-ball to mom, who might have missed it? At least she is able to know about Johnny’s hit within seconds of its occurrence…

These two things, the electronic banking marvels that have made us ever so efficient, and our “communicators” which you likely have on your belt, in your purse, or sitting on your desk within two feet of your mouse pad (don’t laugh, you know who you are- as you glance over at your LG)…have really put our pace into motion, and our need for immediate delivery of information and news is every more insistent.

We need to consciously savor quiet times as I realize that the last 20 years have represented such a launch of speedy innovations, that my daughters don’t even realize that walking to a quiet place to sit and watch birds fly by, or watch waves crash onto a rocky shore has true value. I mean serious cerebral value, to allow our minds to wander and just pull away from the “pace”. How many people have the luxury of whiling away a weekend morning reading the paper anymore?

It is the expectation that we can find information with the tap of a keyboard and buy anything and have it shipped to our door within a minute or two by finding the right web portal, and balance our accounts and pay our bills, even sitting in our cars, raises unrealistically, our expectations about slower, more human, things. Some things just need to take time. Maybe our choices about how many things we can get done in a day are unrealistic. Technology pushes the limits of our minds. Maybe that’s a good thing. But, like learning, and teaching our kids what is right, and caring for people who need attention, such as our aging parents (who are at a different and less warp-speed pace than we are), some things should be taken slowly.  A whole generation or more are still living that do not understand or believe the pace we maintain is necessary. There are lessons in this.

Like my friend Glenn Beck said on his radio program this week as I was speeding to an appointment in Silicon Valley, “Life didn’t get complicated, WE got complicated.”

In the realm of transportation, we have also become more automated. Electric windows were an impressive innovation when I was a kid, and power steering and air conditioning were still options. Now the most basic cars have that and more. Along with cruise control, and integrated satellite navigation, and Bluetooth wireless microphone technology, along with automatic parking control, anti-lock braking, airbags, and I-pod plugs, we just drive faster- because either we are not paying attention, believe high speeds to be safer- or the cars are so good we don’t notice that traffic is flowing bumper to bumper, seven lanes wide, at 80 miles per hour? All of these elements just contribute to “speed, while living”.

If the next best thing is better power sources and engines for all the transporting we are doing, I am enthusiastic for private enterprise to come up with a million different solutions for these power plants to roll onto the market. BMW has had an operable Hydrogen Car for years. Logistically, solutions for fueling still need to be worked out. Hybrid cars are being received enthusiastically, even if they don’t make total financial sense. I thing exciting developments with hybrids will be coming quickly in the coming months, as automakers try to out-do each other in the competition for leadership. A lot is at stake as we try to innovate ourselves out of the addiction to oil. Consumers will decide- and when they do so en masse, profits will drive even more innovation.

I can name one famous female presidential candidate who recently made a straight-faced suggestion to nationalize those bad oil companies’ profits for some highly efficient and effective federal program to fix the mess of high oil prices and engineer the private purchases of consumers into smaller and smaller cars? Please. Solutions are being discovered by the private sector at a typically breakneck pace, and they are rolling down the streets of our towns and highways in dramatically increasing numbers. I don’t think we need to federalize the solution and we can look forward to foreign policy that is less directed toward “energy security”.

Consumers are unloading SUV’s, and buying small, safe and efficient cars, hybrid or not, due to their intelligent calculations that at four bucks a gallon, this transportation thing is getting really expensive, and it is suddenly becoming very cool to be seen in your efficient car.

The complicated and fast-paced gadget environment we live in just welcomed a new arrival: the I-phone. It looks like a fine device, with some amazing features and functionality. Whether it will revolutionize the simplicity of use of our PDA’s and wrestle market share from the entrenched players in this market space, we are speeding on a rocket to more convenience, more connectivity, and the ideas of speed and efficiency ratchet one more increment forward. If we realize where we have been with all this gadgetry, historically, may we take a break and keep things in perspective? I’d like to see more people stopping to watch the formation of a sunset for more than just a moment’s time. And, person to person, savor the silliness of mankind, who is forever trying to improve our lives for the sake of speed and efficiency.

Someday my interviews could take place on a phone, with a full screen, real-time streaming video of both parties, in order to take in the nuances of someone’s personality, and to catch a set of averted eyes, or that sharp outfit, or any other bit that will allow me to assess someone’s suitability for an executive position. I hope we are a ways from that, because I just like meeting people…