In defense of the faster horse
If you’ve worked in the tech business at any point in your life, there’s a 99% chance you have seen this quote on a Powerpoint slide:
“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse”
- Henry Ford.
If you haven’t worked in the tech business, your odds drop a bit, and it might not have involved Powerpoint, but there’s still a pretty good chance you’ve heard it.
It’s almost certainly not something Henry Ford said, but that isn’t what this series is going to address. Henry Ford is almost certainly not someone you want to look at as a role model, but that is also not what this series is going to address.
What this series is going to address is the point someone is trying to make when they paste that quote into their deck, and the point they are really making without realizing it.
Because the quote draws a line between two groups of people: the people with the vision to create the future, and the… everyone else. It’s implied, if not outright stated, that these “customers” are a mass of proletarian sheep, trudging through life without vision or creativity, content to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done. It’s on that Powerpoint slide because the person giving the presentation sees themselves as one of the visionaries, and they want you to feel like if you are part of their project, you will be too. Anybody could just ask customers what they want and then build that thing; only a true visionary can imagine something nobody is asking for and know that it will be a hit anyway. And customers are never going to ask for anything worth building, because their imagination is limited to what they already see and use every day.
So the point the Powerpoint is trying to make, the point its presenter thinks it’s making, is that the only way to make something revolutionary is to ignore how things are already happening. You can’t just make fill in known gaps or introduce a new tool to solve a known need. You have to invent a totally new way of working. This is a game changer, the marketing copy will say. You want to be part of the project that changed the game, right? Course you do. The quote is saying that those hypothetical customers in a hypothetical quote would have been wrong to ask for a faster horse, so their opinions can safely be ignored.
But the point the presenter is actually making is something else: they aren’t going to build what customers say they want, because they want glory or market share. Maybe they can’t build what the customers are asking for. Maybe they just don’t want to.
Because you know what? Faster horses would have ruled.
Imagine this only, like, even faster
The case for the faster horse
Ignore the biological implausibility for a moment and go on a journey with me. Let’s say Ford did ask some customers, jotted down notes about faster horses, and went back and closed down his car business to focus on genetic engineering. Say he’d been able to produce a horse that enabled travel at speeds comparable to Ford’s cars. What does that mean?
Well, we get to keep the faster travel, boosts to commerce, and the convenience of just generally having to spend less time traveling, so that’s a win. But you also get:
Existing infrastructure is still useful - roads, blacksmiths, feed, saddlemaking, all still work just fine. The blacksmith gets to keep making horseshoes. The saddle business stays open.
Horses last longer than cars did back then, and longer than most cars do today. Plus, in the right combinations, horses have an ability that cars never have: they can make other, smaller horses that will grow into full-size horses some day!
Certainly history is full of people being injured by horse-related accidents; they can get spooked or scared, and behave unpredictably. But you know what horses don’t do? Run at full speed into a wall, or another horse, or a lake, just because someone wasn’t paying attention.
Full self driving, available thousands of years before Elon promised it would be delivered, and tens of thousands before he actually delivers it.
If a “fast horse boom” happened, there might be some extra… let’s say biomass to deal with. But it’s natural, biodegradable, and even useful as a fertilizer. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t have to worry about smog, or carbon monoxide, or the global economy being in the hands of a few oil companies. Would we end up with the same problems from “big oat?” Maybe. I’d be willing to risk it.
Horses, being living creatures, have personalities and can form attachments. People love horses. In their own way, depending on the person, horses can love them back.
Could there be problems with wind while traveling at that speed on a horse? Sure. But those problems existed for cars too. People invented goggles. It was fine.
So if we hold the speeds to be equal, on the one side we have a self-sustaining, non-polluting, intelligent product with all the support infrastructure already in place. On the other, we have a dirty, loud, lifeless product that has a limited lifespan and requires an entirely new suite of infrastructure in order to operate.
The problem wasn’t that customers were wrong to ask (hypothetically) for a faster horse; the problem was that Henry (again hypothetically) Ford didn’t have any way to make them. So he had to convince all the people who were (hypothetically) asking for faster horses to buy something he could make: cars.
We see this same dynamic everywhere in technology. If someone started selling a smartphone with a battery that lasts for a month, or even for a week, they’d have the next super-hit on their hands. But nobody can do that right now, so we are all expected to get super excited for a new phone model with 1 more megapixel in the camera and sweet new slightly darker silver color, because that’s what is possible to build right now.
How many cars were actually faster horses?
This series is going to examine tech breakthroughs that are looked at as huge milestones, and come to a final binding judgement on the question: Is this a faster horse?
Faster horses are advances that move things forward in some significant way while allowing the existing technical, commercial, and social infrastructure to keep functioning.
Cars are advances that required changes in the network surrounding them in order to reach high adoption: think paved roads, gas stations, mechanic training, the commercial channels needed to get the rubber for all those tires from the places it grows to the places where cars were.
And there’s a third category, much rarer. That is the Unicorn: an advance that moves things forward so fundamentally that previous infrastructure withers away not because it’s been replaced, but because it’s simply no longer needed.
Look for future installments in this series to dive into particular topics. If you have a topic you’d like to see covered, send me a message and I’ll be happy to render my judgment.