CPA Trendlines

A look at his reading stack may give us some clues.

by Rick Telberg
At Large for AICPA Insider

If a few decades ago, you knew what Bill Gates knew about the future, you wouldn’t need to be reading this.

To find out what Bill Gates knows about the future now, try reading “FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop ? From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication.” It’s one of five books the software mogul recommended at his annual CEO Summit a little while ago.

Want a clue into the future? Take a peek into the mind of Bill Gates. You’ll find a few common themes: Tough competition, relentless change, and unflinching standards.
The other books he recommended are: “The Trendmaster’s Guide: Get a Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next” by Robyn Waters, “Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, “The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization” by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, and “MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves That Drive Exceptional Business Growth” by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. Macmillan.

In “FAB,” author Neil Gershenfeld, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who teaches a popular course called How to Make (Almost) Anything, postulates that fabrication or “fab” systems are growing at a clip similar to how PCs evolved in the late 1970s and will become equally pervasive. If true, the next technological wave involves systems that combine software and tools in personal-sized laboratory packages to custom manufacture any variety of products.

This could have dramatic implications for any accountant or financial executive involved in many phases of business, especially manufacturing. And the theories could have a significant impact for professionals involved in strategic planning. Just recall the shifts in financial systems sparked years ago by just-in-time inventory, or today’s so-called “real-time close.”

It may sound like science fiction, but fab labs are out there with success stories that include northern Norwegian herders making wireless systems and integrated animal tags to track their flocks; inner city Boston children converting trash into jewelry; and Gershenfeld’s students “fabbing ” such things as an alarm lock that you must wrestle with to turn off. There’s also been celebrity buy-in: science buff actor Alan Alda has fabbed a camera with a lens with periscope-like capabilities designed to avoid red-eyed photos when shooting with a flash.

And like PCs, prices are expected to drop to affordable household ranges of $1,000 in a few years. It now costs about $20,000 for lab set-ups that would include a milling machine for making precision parts; laser cutters for making circuit boards and software for programming chips.

Promising fab lab peripherals are far along in development. For instance, inkjet printer-like devices are already at work that, instead of spreading ink, spread layers of plastic, powdered metal or other materials to create such hard goods as the shell of a cellular phone. Combine that with metal circuitry manufacturing capability and the fab lab can deliver a customized cell phone.

The tome, which is not without a little hype, goes from the roots of industrialism in the Renaissance, through the Industrial Age and the rapid development of computer systems in the 1900s up to the advent of fab and its coming revolution in which “industrial production would merge with personal expression, which would merge with digital design.”

Gershenfeld makes a strong case that fabs will indeed become household technology that families will use to make appliances cheaper and possibly better than what’s available for sale, or build distinctive items that cannot be found at Wal-Mart, And if the item breaks, the fab lab could take it apart and re-build it or recycle the materials for some future production.

It may sound farfetched to think that manufacturing and design systems that corporations have already spent billions of dollars to build would ever be available in a home. But there was a time when computers were massive mainframes that cost companies millions. Today’s home computers are even more powerful than those mainframes and cost a few hundred bucks.

Gershenfeld predicts the same phenomenon will occur with fab lab manufacturing. Why doubt him? He’s got Bill Gates’s interest. That should be enough for any accountant or financial manager to take note.

Posted August 20, 2005