Editors' Rating
Published: 04 May 2005
It would be hard to accuse Peter Cochrane, former head of research for British Telecom, of being unenthusiastic about technology. In his days at BT, he took an early decision to ban paper memos in favour of email. You could call him Britain's answer to Nicholas Negroponte -- but there are significant differences. For one thing, Cochrane grew up in a mining village in a house with three books, and began his career at BT digging holes in the ground for the company to put poles in. His rise through the ranks is one of the more surprising success stories, and his fascination with technology is always tempered with a certain down-to-earth, hands-on practicality: this man may be happy to be a cyborg, but he also built his house with his own hands.
The upshot is that the columns he writes for (ZDNet UK's sister site) Silicon.com, which form the basis for this book, are both futuristic and provocative. In Uncommon Sense, Cochrane critiques the 3G auctions that have left mobile network operators struggling and tries to look into the future. There are plenty of pictures and diagrams to illustrate his points.
Still, there are things Cochrane is happy to accept that a lot of us aren't. He will gladly, for example, trade away his personal data in return for not having to stand in queues in shops or achieve even a slight apparent improvement in airport security. One of his ideas for RFID chips, for example, is that scanning a plane full of passengers might reveal that four passengers apparently travelling separately in fact bought their mobile phones and some of their clothing from the same stores on the same day using the same credit card. Alarm bells might ring. They might indeed; or 800-odd people might riot if the plane in question is a packed new Airbus 380 that's delayed for five hours while security personnel check out all the possible variables and interconnections among the passengers. (Geoff Ryman's online novel, 253 shows just how many coincidental connections there might be.) Or, as before the World Trade Center attacks, the security people might never find the important connections.
But that's the point about this book. You can disagree with plenty of what Cochrane says and still find interesting ideas to gnaw on. Why do managers treat their employees in ways they'd never consider treating their children? What do network effects really mean? How do laws that control information survive in a world where it's impossible to stop people from importing books, music and videos in electronic form? Why has exciting technology produced such boring presentations? You may think it's odd to describe coffee as a chaos generator, but Cochrane doesn't; he's been at too many conferences where the coffee arrives and the mobile network crashes because everyone's taken that moment to make a phone call.
You probably won't get specific business insights out of Uncommon Sense. But stretching your mind is always a good thing -- that's how you come up with new ideas.
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