TechArchive

Original article date: March 1998

I’ve just come back from skiing. Well OK, snowboarding (that explains the pleasant aroma ­ Ed). Well, OK, falling over a lot in the snow. And the Winter Olympics are all over the TV, so it seems like an appropriate topic for a discussion.

Let’s take a (UK pounds)15 ski pass. For that, you spend the whole day in a superbly maintained national park, getting non stop rides on well maintained cable cars and chairlifts (what sort of grief did they go to installing the support pylons into the mountainous landscape?). Then, like a herd of dinosaurs, a vast fleet of snow maintenance vehicles lumber up the slopes in the fading light and prepare the slopes for tomorrow’s fun. The sheer scale of investment is massive. In the UK, a cable car ride with a view like that over superb scenery which is the gateway into a national park would probably cost (UK pounds)15 in its own right. It kind of makes you wonder how they do it.

The other interesting thing I noticed was the parallel between snowboards and mountain bikes. About 20 years back, conventional bikes were in a rut, technologically speaking (I think ‘mature in design’ is the correct term). They were fairly well optimised, and the only true improvements were incremental ones in materials.

Then along came the mountain bike and suddenly the field opened up. New manufacturers thought up wacky new technologies and everyone could play because nobody was quite sure what the bikes were supposed to look like or be used for. And the ‘proper’ cycling people thought they weren’t really to be taken seriously and even when they started holding their own competitive events they were still regarded as a bit of a fringe.

But more and more the newcomers became ‘mainstream’ (look at the number of mountain bikes around) until eventually people had to accept they were here to stay. Meanwhile, the ‘forget the old rules’ design free-for-all which happened as mountain bikes (and snowboards) raced to reach design maturity had actually produced spinoffs that fed back into the mainstream market (‘hybrid’ bikes, and in skiing, ‘carving’ skis to aid snowboard-like turning). This was perhaps a sign that however ‘optimised’ the traditional sport was, it had actually benefited from being challenged.

But in fact it wasn’t the technology that was in a rut (carving skis are not actually new), but the market (carving skis had just not been promoted to the masses). What had happened was that the existence of the new sport had made it possible for the mainstream technologies to stray from the road without seeming extreme.

A similar thing has happened with 3D CAD for machine design. At the first attempt, 3D CAD failed to capture the world’s hearts, but this time around, some very big, aggressively marketed and expensive products have kicked down some doors, and basically made people believe that 3D CAD (though it’s maybe too far out to risk just yet) is actually one day going to be the way to go. And it’s opened the door for smaller vendors who could not possibly have got in 10 years ago. A sort of readjustment of market attitudes. Remember saying you wouldn’t ever change to Windows?

I said last month that I was keen to hear of more examples of cool use of new technology. This month’s winner is a company called Neural Technologies, whose software watches the world markets and spots Nick Leeson-like fraud, or watches traffic through cellphone nodes and predicts failures. The key thing is that it doesn’t really need to be shown how, it just watches and learns.

As an engineer, my first thought was that it should be watching factories looking for imminent breakdowns or problems, but I guess the savings here just don’t compare to the telephone numbers they talk in the city. Ho hum.

March 1998