Eb60616Transformation
Today’s headline news: “Bill Gates … will allow others to run the company he co-founded and guided to dominance…” This richest man in the world (Forbes) had the skills, timing and luck to amass his $50 billion fortune by transforming an industry. Know he will spend most of his time giving it away with his foundation.
A key date noted in the AP article is: “1980: IBM chooses Microsoft to create the operating system for its first PC.” That’s why I mentioned luck. My brother-in-law Bill Clark IV was one of the designers of the IBM PC in Boca Rotan, FL. The IBM selection happened when he won the argument with marketing and within his engineering team for Microsoft’s DOS vs. Digital Research’s CPM. Could have gone either way!
Over the past 25 years, Microsoft and other software on our personal computers from has transformed many aspects of our business and personal life. But now a transformation is taking place. The software on our PC is being replaced by Internet centric computing (Google, Yahoo, eBay, etc.). Purchases of packaged software are now competing with advertising on the Internet as the business model. Over the next 25 years Microsoft and PC software faces huge challenges. They could fade like once dominant steam locomotive as the next technological wave sweeps our desktop.
What gives me fits is that we all know these transformations happen, but we rarely strategic plan, redesign, and implement to reap the early benefits. K-12 education was invented 300 years ago by the Prussians and implemented universally in the U.S. 120 years ago. Me-thinks K-12 might be ready to embrace a well proven transformation to eLearning. With plummeting costs of computing and increasing effectiveness of digital curriculum and online teacher professional development we are at the tipping point. What is it going to take to Arizona tip toward eLearning?
It’s not as simple as one person winning a single decision within a small IBM design team during a one-day structured dialectic in 1980. But it’s not impossible. A small Arizona wide team (10’s) with a modest group of supporters (100’s) has been making slow headway for the past ten years. Since 2004 the tempo has picked up. We believe that the year 2006 will the “one day in 1980” which will be seen as the historic eLearning tipping point for massive Arizona K-12 education. And maybe we’ll get real lucky and become the dominate education state as Microsoft became the dominate software company!
The best is yet to come.
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