Many of us are intrigued by miracles that scream “THE FUTURE” like flying cars. But sometimes the best inventions are more about brain power than technological magic. Let me give you a few examples in my quest to appreciate the ingenuity of boring things.
Take apple chains and rafters.
I recently became acquainted with an online grocery delivery company in New Jersey called Misfits Market. A lot businesses to have struggled with the cost and complexity to bring us bananas or Doritos at our command. Misfits know this.
The company’s answer to the history of delivery failures is to think small. It tries to save pennies and eliminate small inefficiencies here and there that can be the difference between failure and success.
Here are a few examples of what the small innovations look like: stores and delivery services usually only sell the middle pieces of salmon. Misfits buys and sells the other cuts, which are just as delicious, at a discount. Abhi Ramesh, the chief executive of Misfits, also excitedly told me about skipping some steps in the long chain of apple farmers, packers and distributors. Pruning a middleman or two can save time and money.
“Boring problems are the most worth solving,” Ramesh told me. this guy is speaking mine language. It’s a competitive advantage when a company does a difficult, boring and expensive thing a little better, he said.
There are other food companies take similar approaches, and I don’t know if the business will succeed. But Misfits is an example of a technology company that knows an industry well and believes it can slightly improve established ways of working. This is what technological progress often looks like: a new, but perhaps unobtrusive twist on what came before it.
Roy Bahat, an investor in young technology companies at the Bloomberg Beta firm, uses the term “hot swap” to refer to a type of start-up that thinks big by tinkering with the status quo. He gave me examples like Flexport, which is trying to streamline the steps required to ship crates of goods by sea or air, and Newfront, which is trying to do something similar for insurance brokers. (Bloomberg Beta is an investor in Newfront.)
One characteristic of these companies, Bahat said, is that they don’t strive for big change because Warby Parker did it with glasses, for example. That kind of change can feel scary or threatening, especially for customers in big industries like trucking or insurance, he said. Instead, a hot-swap start-up promises something familiar but better.
This doesn’t always look like WOW, but sometimes it is. Dan Patt, an aerospace engineer I spoke to recently about parcel delivery by drone, told me about a construction company near Boise, Idaho that used something cool: robots! – to enhance a snooze party.
The House of Design company sells huge machines with robotic arms that automate some steps in building a house or apartment building, including roof trusses.
I had to google what those are. They are triangular segments of wood assembled together to form the skeleton of a roof. Roof truss designs vary, and putting them together is relatively repetitive and labor-intensive work, Michael Lindley, a House of Design sales and marketing manager, told me.
House of Design promises that its systems are compatible with popular design software for the construction industry and that trusses are produced faster and with fewer people. There are technological ingenuity in House of Design, Patt said, but what’s different is the creativity in the manufacturing process.
My colleague Conor Dougherty has written about the ups and downs of excitement in home automation automation. Katerra, a leading tech start-up, collapsed last year after it tried to streamline every construction step, including by making its own light bulbs.
The history of failure shows the hubris of to believe that you can reimagine a major industry, be it real estate or groceries. Established ways of doing things may have come about for a reason. Moreover, slowness is powerful, the status quo is often quite good and smart technology cannot solve structural problems.
But it is useful to remind ourselves what invention is. It is not always a driverless taxi or a new smartphone that is significantly different from what was before. Often it is a product or a process that we know and slowly make it a little easier or cheaper.
Before we go…
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Amazon is trying again in healthcare. Amazon say it will buy One Medical, which operates primary care clinics in the US. Amazon watchers have been predicting for years that the company would transform healthcare, including with its 2018 purchase from an online pharmacy chain and a (now finished) venture to shake up the healthcare benefits for workers. Amazon has not transformed healthcare.
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“What I’ve done wrong with Facebook.” Farhad Manjoo, a columnist at The New York Times Opinion section, told everyone to join Facebook in 2009 reflects about what he regrets, including not considering the implications of Facebook’s ubiquity.
Related: Facebook is tweaking its app to be more like TikTok. to resemblereports my colleague Mike Isaac.
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Which computer should you buy for your child? Kimber Streams of Wirecutter, The Times’ product recommendation service, has: tips about reusing an old computer, buying a used one and choosing a new model for school children and students.
Hug for this
Hello from snack-guzzling Moshua red panda at the Oregon Zoo.
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