The Analog Tipping Points Lurking in Tech’s Future
This is a guest post from John Andrews. John is 30-year plus veteran of the banking industry. For the last 23 years he was the Head of Investor Relations for Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citadel, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank. He makes the point that explosive tech growth, which has had a significant impact on renewable energy growth, has been achieved in the absence of regulatory oversight, and that this is likely to change in the future as some of its less desirable impacts become more obvious.
Too Much Tech in Tech
There is too much tech in tech. That sounds counterintuitive if not a bit crazy. Innovative ideas and great engineering have been the foundation of the tech industry’s extraordinary success for decades. And those who drove that success – the engineers, programmers and mathematicians – rightly dominate the industry’s leadership today.
But that success has created a myopia in the industry, particularly in senior management. This will increasingly become a problem as lurking in the future are meaningful challenges that the tech sector is only now beginning to confront. These challenges are largely not technical in nature,and they do not play to the industry’s traditional strengths. And as we’ve seen in a string of recent scandals, they are challenges for which tech companies appear completely unprepared.
This flat-footedness is not surprising. A less remarked-upon contributor to the tech sector’s success has been its singular lack of scrutiny. The industry has lacked any meaningful regulatory or legislative constraints, and until recently, has not endured messy congressional or parliamentary hearings, skeptical media coverage, or meaningful public outcry. Even the occasional anti-trust action or the dot.com boom and bust left little lasting effect on how the tech industry does business.
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