Despite its high-tech sheen, medicine looks a lot like some of the dinosaur industries that were upended by competition from unexpected sources: autos in the 1970s, for example, or mainframe computers in the 1980s.
What top executive would bet his company the way Tom Watson did IBM in the early 1950s on mainframe computers or the way Bill Gates bet Microsoft in the mid-1990s on Windows if he knew failure would tempt prosecutors, politicians and bureaucrats to destroy him?
The present generation of factory robots is akin to early mainframe computers in offices, reckons Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot, an American firm whose products include the Roomba, a robotic vacuum-cleaner, as well as military robots.
An innovative proposal has been offered by Dr. Morris Davis, the inventor of a program known as Transition Software that has demonstrated impressive capabilities to accomplish such corrective action on mainframe computers in a fraction of the time -- and at far less cost -- than is currently associated with human review of each line of code.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Protecting against the 'millenium bug'
The pattern began in the 1950s, when hugely expensive mainframe computers were first used to save correspondingly huge sums in information-intensive functions in the financial-services industry, then in accounting, payroll and inventory-control tasks in other big organisations.
What top executive would bet his company the way Tom Watson did IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) in the early 1950s on mainframe computers, the way Bill Gates bet Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) in the mid-1990s on Windows, if he knew failure would tempt prosecutors, politicians and bureaucrats to destroy him?
Motivated by curiosity, boredom, and hunger for a little power, they range from the mildly annoying (such as the Hacking for Girlies group that brought down the New York Times site on the day the Starr Report came out) on up to the criminal "crackers" (such as Vladimir Levin, who allegedly transferred millions of dollars from Citibank's mainframe computers to accounts in Finland and Israel).
Many of those programs are still being used in some older PC software and large mainframe computers -- used by government agencies, universities, Wall Street and businesses worldwide.
Just as the PC usurped the mainframe and set off explosive change in computers, new optical technologies may someday overtake electronics and topple the established telecom order.
Just as cheap personal computers undermined the mainframe business in the 1980s and open-source programs like Linux and Mysql are challenging Microsoft and Oracle today, outfits like Fastcase are attacking Wexis' stranglehold on legal research from the bottom up.
Using mainframe computers and low-wage workers in Korea, he rekeyboarded the contents of 70 years of Readers Guides and reorganized the material alphabetically rather than chronologically.
The shares trade at a PE ratio of about 14 and more than twice sales, just as it reported a worrisome drop in sales of big-ticket items, like mainframe computers, and some slowing of software sales.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, for instance, firms stocked up on the new thing at the time, mainframe computers.
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