March 26, 1998

You're not working on the next big thing?

Bill Schweber, Technical Editor

Often, the next big thing turns out to be just another next thing, minus the big.

Engineers are working on diverse designs, systems, and software. Some of these products are touted as the next big thing. (Let's create our own acronym, NBT.) These NBTs get lots of attention and tons of buzz and hype, and they generate high expectation among many communities of interest, including OEMs, outside investors, stock-option holders, and even an occasional end user. Unfortunately, engineers who are not working on the NBT often feel like they're laboring in the shadow of those who are. After all, the glow is with the NBT folks, right?

Quite often, however, reality plays one of its nasty tricks, and the NBT turns out to be just another next thing, minus the big. Remember interactive TV? How about Web push technology, postulated in 1996 and early 1997 to be the defining and perhaps dominant Web user mode? Yet you haven't heard much about push this year.

If you're not working on one of these purported NBT designs, take heart. Don't feel that what you're doing has little impact. This is not just a warm and fuzzy piety proclaiming that "everyone's work is important in its own way" or some touchy-feely self-esteem talk. The facts are that the less glamorous designs are often the long-distance winners, and the bright-flash designs are not. As the Year 2000 software problem makes clear, lots of less-heralded designs and products have very long lives in an amazing number of applications.

It's not just Year 2000 software either. Despite the ever-faster cycle times in product generation, a very large number of older, embedded systems are still in use, doing their task day in and day out, and even new designs are still using the venerable 8051 family. Ironically, it's often these non-NBT designs that move applied technology forward one small increment at a time but with a pretty large integral over time.

How does this situation affect you? Whatever you're working on, make sure you think about design decisions and implications going forward. You need to do a thorough job of documenting your design itself as well as the rationale for your design decisions and features. Even if what you're working on today is not expected to be among the selected NBTs, you'll likely soon be working on its next generation and need the support that thorough design-oriented documentation provides. You--or a fellow design engineer--will appreciate it.

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