The newly-released book Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion looks at how positive visions of the future convince people to invest in, adopt, and use new technologies. For many emerging technologies, rational arguments and financials aren’t enough, because of the uncertainty. At some point, there has to be a leap of faith. But how does this leap of faith happen?

My chapter, “Visions of the Next Big Thing: Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for New Technologies,” is a study of more than 2,500 articles published over a 10 year period, to see how companies in the once-hot Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) space convinced themselves to make big investments in the technology.

Through arguments with colorful names such as new mass markets, killer features, inevitable progressions, bundling together, and the ever-popular horse race, 34 of the leading companies in computing, telecom, and consumer electronics convinced themselves to make major PDA investments, though most were soon abandoned. When success didn’t materialize as quickly as they hoped, they used variants of these arguments to rationalize their failures.

The chapter includes two short case studies of companies that were able to successfully resist the prevailing rhetoric of the day, and how they did it. The British PDA maker Psion managed to resist the craze for ‘pen-based computing’, while the American company Palm resisted the conventional wisdom of phone-based ‘communicator’ PDAs with their own vision of a ‘connected organizer’.

(Added 6/23/08)  A nice review of the book here that mentions the chapter.