Who drives the technology evolution? Customers or Industry?

Let’s examine the cellular phone market. In the late 1990s, when I was a freshman in South Korea, it was hard to find anyone who had a cellular phone, because it was much more expensive than a beeper, which most students had at that time, and cellular phones were not well-supplied to the market. Thus, we would have to wait in a line at a public phone to call someone or check voice messages from a beeper. Today, it is hard to find anyone who does NOT have a cellular phone and the supply for both beepers and public phones have dramatically decreased.

Moreover, competition in the cellular phone market has been getting fierce. As innovative technologies have emerged, the cellular phone market has adapted to the new technology as much as they can to meet the consumers’ needs. When I got my first cellular phone in 1999, I did not imagine that I could eventually call my friends while seeing their faces, watch movies, listen to music, check emails and even help me when I lost my way. I cannot imagine now what could happen next.

So, who drives such new technologies? Is it the consumers or the industry? If consumers are not against the new technologies, their need to adopt the technologies will increase. Then, of course, the industry would try to adopt and introduce the new technologies to meet the consumers’ needs. In this sense, it seems that consumers drive the market. However, the market might determine and even control consumers’ tastes, no matter whether they wanted to adopt the new technologies or not, and could urge consumers to accept the new products. Then the older products would not exist any more (as happened to public phones). As Anderson argued in his book, it is probable that we do not have choices for the things we do not know.