Simon Partner
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520217928
- eISBN:
- 9780520923171
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520217928.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Occupations, Professions, and Work
This book investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, it discovers that behind the ...
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This book investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, it discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s. This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, the book quickly turns its sights to the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products. It relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.Less
This book investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, it discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s. This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, the book quickly turns its sights to the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products. It relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.
Jeffrey L. Funk
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804783859
- eISBN:
- 9780804784924
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804783859.001.0001
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Innovation
This book explores why new industries emerge at specific moments in time and in certain countries. Part I shows that technologies which experience “exponential” improvements in cost and performance ...
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This book explores why new industries emerge at specific moments in time and in certain countries. Part I shows that technologies which experience “exponential” improvements in cost and performance have a greater chance of becoming new industries. When “low-end” discontinuities incur exponential improvements, they often displace the dominant technologies and become “disruptive” innovations. Part II explores this phenomenon and instances in which discontinuities spawn new industries because they impact higher-level systems. Part III addresses a different set of questions—ones that consider the challenges of new industries for firms and governments. Part IV uses ideas from the previous chapters to analyze the present and future of selected technologies. Based on analyses of many industries, including those with an electronic and clean energy focus, the book challenges the conventional wisdom that performance dramatically rises following the emergence of a new technology, that costs fall due to increases in cumulative production, and that low-end innovations automatically become disruptive ones.Less
This book explores why new industries emerge at specific moments in time and in certain countries. Part I shows that technologies which experience “exponential” improvements in cost and performance have a greater chance of becoming new industries. When “low-end” discontinuities incur exponential improvements, they often displace the dominant technologies and become “disruptive” innovations. Part II explores this phenomenon and instances in which discontinuities spawn new industries because they impact higher-level systems. Part III addresses a different set of questions—ones that consider the challenges of new industries for firms and governments. Part IV uses ideas from the previous chapters to analyze the present and future of selected technologies. Based on analyses of many industries, including those with an electronic and clean energy focus, the book challenges the conventional wisdom that performance dramatically rises following the emergence of a new technology, that costs fall due to increases in cumulative production, and that low-end innovations automatically become disruptive ones.
Subrata Dasgupta
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780199309412
- eISBN:
- 9780197562857
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199309412.003.0016
- Subject:
- Computer Science, History of Computer Science
In February 1951, the Ferranti Mark I was delivered to the University of Manchester. This was the commercial “edition” of the Manchester Mark I (see Chapter 8, Section ...
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In February 1951, the Ferranti Mark I was delivered to the University of Manchester. This was the commercial “edition” of the Manchester Mark I (see Chapter 8, Section XIII), the product of a collaboration between town and gown, the former being the Manchester firm of Ferranti Limited. It became (by a few months) the world’s first commercially available digital computer (followed in June 1951 by the “Universal Automatic Computer” [UNIVAC], developed by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation). The Ferranti Mark I was unveiled formally at an inaugural conference held in Manchester, June 9 to 12, 1951. At this conference, Maurice Wilkes delivered a lecture titled “The Best Way to Design an Automatic Calculating Machine.” This conference is probably (perhaps unfairly) more known because of Wilkes’s lecture than for its primary focus, the Ferranti Mark I. For during this lecture, Wilkes announced a new approach to the design of a computer’s control unit called microprogramming, which would be massively consequential in the later evolution of computers. Wilkes’s lecture also marked something else: the search for order, structure, and simplicity in the design of computational artifacts; and an attendant concern for, a preoccupation with, the design process itself in the realm of computational artifacts. We have already seen the first manifestations of this concern with the design process in the Goldstine-von Neumann invention of a flow diagram notation for beginning the act of computer programming (see Chapter 9, Section III), and in David Wheeler’s and Stanley Gill’s discussions of a method for program development (Chapter 10, Section IV). Wilkes’s lecture was notable for “migrating” this concern into the realm of the physical computer itself. We recall that, in May 1949, the Cambridge EDSAC became fully operational (see Chapter 8, Section XIII). The EDSAC was a serial machine in that reading from or writing into memory was done 1 bit at a time (bit serial) ; and, likewise, the arithmetic unit performed its operations in a bit-by-bit fashion. Soon after the EDSAC’s completion, while others in his laboratory were busy refining the programming techniques and exploring its use in scientific applications (see Chapter 9, Sections V–VIII; and Chapter 10), Wilkes became preoccupied with issues of regularity and complexity in computer design and their relation to reliability.
Less
In February 1951, the Ferranti Mark I was delivered to the University of Manchester. This was the commercial “edition” of the Manchester Mark I (see Chapter 8, Section XIII), the product of a collaboration between town and gown, the former being the Manchester firm of Ferranti Limited. It became (by a few months) the world’s first commercially available digital computer (followed in June 1951 by the “Universal Automatic Computer” [UNIVAC], developed by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation). The Ferranti Mark I was unveiled formally at an inaugural conference held in Manchester, June 9 to 12, 1951. At this conference, Maurice Wilkes delivered a lecture titled “The Best Way to Design an Automatic Calculating Machine.” This conference is probably (perhaps unfairly) more known because of Wilkes’s lecture than for its primary focus, the Ferranti Mark I. For during this lecture, Wilkes announced a new approach to the design of a computer’s control unit called microprogramming, which would be massively consequential in the later evolution of computers. Wilkes’s lecture also marked something else: the search for order, structure, and simplicity in the design of computational artifacts; and an attendant concern for, a preoccupation with, the design process itself in the realm of computational artifacts. We have already seen the first manifestations of this concern with the design process in the Goldstine-von Neumann invention of a flow diagram notation for beginning the act of computer programming (see Chapter 9, Section III), and in David Wheeler’s and Stanley Gill’s discussions of a method for program development (Chapter 10, Section IV). Wilkes’s lecture was notable for “migrating” this concern into the realm of the physical computer itself. We recall that, in May 1949, the Cambridge EDSAC became fully operational (see Chapter 8, Section XIII). The EDSAC was a serial machine in that reading from or writing into memory was done 1 bit at a time (bit serial) ; and, likewise, the arithmetic unit performed its operations in a bit-by-bit fashion. Soon after the EDSAC’s completion, while others in his laboratory were busy refining the programming techniques and exploring its use in scientific applications (see Chapter 9, Sections V–VIII; and Chapter 10), Wilkes became preoccupied with issues of regularity and complexity in computer design and their relation to reliability.
