I generally agree with Seth Godin but I've found that, on the rare occasions he is wrong, he's really wrong. This is one of those times.
In a post entitled "The small-minded vision of the technology elite" he says...
Take a look at the geek discussion boards and you'll see an endless list of sharp-tongued critics, each angling to shoot down one idea or another. And then take a look at the companies that show up at the various pitch shows, and you'll see one company after another pitching incremental improvements based on current assumptions.
The reason is simple: technologists know how to make things work.
When an engineer has a proven ability to ship stuff, to keep things humming and not crashing, it's easy to fall into the trap of rejecting anything that hasn't demonstrated that it can work, that hasn't proven itself in the market.
He then goes on to link to an article he wrote for Fast Company, the gist of which is that the tech industry is filled with "competent" people who resist change out of fear for the disruptions in might cause...
In fact, competence is the enemy of change!
Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That's who they are, and sometimes that's all they've got. No wonder they're not in a hurry to rock the boat.
...
In the face of change, the competent are helpless. Change means a temporary or permanent threat to their competence. But among the competent, the smart ones realize that change is inevitable, that shift happens -- and thus that they are doomed. Hence the tremendous discomfort among our happily competent population.
Here's the thing. I spent my childhood reading books on the technology industry. I love and make a point of knowing even the minuet pieces of trivia in regards to the history of the tech industry. Given that I can tell you there is one basic truth that almost no one knows...
Very rarely do things actually change.
90% of what happens on computers today is done by technology that people have been using for decades. Spreadsheets, Word Processors, E-Mail, etc... Every few years something new comes along but it almost never realizes it's potential as a "change agent"
A perfect example of this is Instant Messaging. IM was, at one time, the death knell for E-Mail. Everyone talked about how, when and why IM was going to crush this stupid old technology of e-mail and bring about a new era of Technological greatness. But it never happened and while IM is certainly still around no one thinks of it as an e-mail killer anymore (though Twitter is filling that role of "wanna be e-mail killer" to many right now).
When you get right down to it the technology industry hasn't changed that much over the years despite it's reputation to the contrary. There are game changers like GUIs or the Web but they are few and generally very far between. More importantly, when those game changers do come along they are pretty obvious.
Which is where Mr. Godin's theories fall apart.
Real change is self-evident. No one looked at a GUI and said "naah, I'd rather stick with DOS instead". People might have taken a while longer to realize what the Web was but once they "got it" everyone was on board. That's how you know something's a change agent.
When comprehending something becomes synonymous with adopting it that is when you know something is going to really change the world.
Everything else is either a fad or a niche market (Instant Messaging). Part of being good at doing a technology based job is realizing that and acting accordingly. Not jumping on every new fad like Mr. Godin would have us believe.