First story:

You’ve probably never have heard of Washington Wentworth Sheffield, but you’ve almost certainly been relying on his invention ever since you were a child. He’s the guy who, back in 1892, created the toothpaste tube. Up to then, toothpaste had been sold in porcelain jars. A family would buy one, and every morning and evening mom, dad and all the little ones would stick their respective toothbrushes into it. Sheffield, a dentist, was disgusted by the unsanitary practice. Having seen flexible metal tubes used for food, he decided to find out if people would buy toothpaste dispensed the same way. He was soon a very wealthy man.

Second story:

Seventy years ago, a young truck driver named Malcom McLean found himself sitting on a New Jersey dock all day, waiting for a gang of slow-moving longshoremen to get around to unloading his rig. As the hours wore on, his annoyance turned into inspiration. He began to wonder whether there wasn’t some way to speed the process of transferring cargo. Instead of unloading his trailer, box by box, and then reloading everything, box by box, into the hold of a ship, why couldn’t the whole trailer be hoisted directly onto the ship’s deck? Why couldn’t you fashion a type of container that could be carried with equal ease by trucks, trains and ships? Two decades later, McLean’s company, Sea-Land, launched the first containership, the Ideal X, on a voyage from Newark to Houston. The world would never be the same.

Moral:

When companies want to think “outside the box,” they often form high-powered brainstorming teams filled with creative thinkers. Usually, those teams fail. Either their pie-in-the-sky ideas go nowhere, or they end up proposing modest improvements that pull in a little more money but fall well short of the breakthroughs they set out to achieve. The stories of Washington Wentworth Sheffield and Malcom McLean indicate a possible reason for the failures. True breakthroughs seem to come not from teams but from individuals and not from professional innovators but from regular people who get frustrated or annoyed by some problem while pursuing their regular jobs. It’s the individual closest to a problem, in other words, that’s most likely to come up with a great new idea for solving it. So if you really want out-of-the-box thinking, find the poor sap who’s suffering the most from being stuck inside the box.

I’ve found this chart, drawing on data from David Nye’s Electrifying America and R.B. Duboff’s “Electric Power in American Manufacturing, 1889-1958,” useful in explaining how a critical business resource – electricity, in this case – can quickly go from being supplied privately, by individual users, to being supplied as a shared utility.

In 1910, most of the electricity used in the United States was generated by private generators owned and maintained by manufacturers. Each factory had its own powerplant. Just 20 years later, most of those private generators had been shut down, as companies came to embrace the superior economics of the utility model.

IT’s next.

John Fontana has written a profile of me in Network World. As you’ll see, my star power burns through every paragraph.

Here are some excerpts from an article, titled “Support Freedom of Speech on the Internet,” that Bill Gates wrote in 1996:

“The Internet’s potential is enormous, and the stakes are high. The Internet can raise the quality of political debate, the quality of education, the quality of life. It is precious and important, and we must not take it for granted…

“The free exchange of ideas on a global basis is something that is important for the U.S. politically and economically. Let’s not undermine the world-wide trend toward free expression by setting a bad example when it comes to free speech on a computer network.

“The Bill of Rights is the foundation on which our nation is built. The Internet is an enormously valuable place in which those rights must continue to thrive. Both the Bill of Rights and the Internet are potentially fragile. Mess with either of them too much, and we might ruin them.

“We can’t let this happen.”

And here are some excerpts from a story in today’s Financial Times:

“Microsoft’s new Chinese internet portal has banned the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing’s political censors…

“Attempts to input words in Chinese such as ‘democracy’ prompted an error message from the site: ‘This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item.’ Other phrases banned included the Chinese for ‘demonstration,’ ‘democratic movement’ and ‘Taiwan independence.'”

The first 25 years in the history of the personal computer were an aberration. Here’s why: The business and consumer markets for the product were essentially the same. When you went out to buy a computer for your home, you used more or less the same criteria that corporate purchasing agents used when buying fleets of PCs for employees. The drab, utilitarian PC on the desk in your study (or spare bedroom) looked the same and worked the same as the drab, utilitarian PC on the desk in your office. That wouldn’t be remarkable for, say, a pencil, but for an expensive and sophisticated product like a computer, it’s an odd state of affairs, to say the least.

But it’s not going to last much longer. I think we’re finally at the point where we’re going to see the home PC diverge, and diverge quite radically, from the business PC. The home PC is going to turn into a real consumer product – or fragment into a whole bunch of consumer products. My loyal readers (that means you, mom) will know I’ve said this before. Earlier this year, I wrote a piece arguing that Dell would have to “class up its act” if it was going to flourish in the home market of the future. I drew an analogy to the car industry, pointing out how consumers first embraced the drab, utilitarian Model T and then dumped it for snazzier models.

So what happened last week? Dell announced that it would unveil a premium brand of home computers in time for Christmas, and it would launch a big advertising push to promote them. Dell consumer veep Mike George even rolled out his own automotive analogy in making the announcement: “Consider this the Lexus of our lineup,” he said. (I don’t believe he actually thanked me by name, though.)

The news was overshadowed by Apple’s embrace of Intel, but in it’s own way it’s equally surprising. And I think both stories are related. Apple and Dell both want to win big in the home. To do so, Apple will have to reach down-market and Dell will have to move up-market. Those shifts, which go against the competitive grain of both companies, began in earnest during the past week.

Remember that old Certs ad – “it’s two, two, two mints in one”? You could say something similar about Amazon.com. With both a big retailing operation and a growing business selling a software platform to other retailers, it’s become two, two, two companies in one. That’s rarely a good thing, either for a business’s investors or its managers. Maybe it’s time for Jeff Bezos to break Amazon in two, as I suggest in a new BusinessWeek Online column.

It’s been a while since the perfect IT storm of the nineties – Y2K, ERP, the euro transition and the Internet goldrush – brought a windfall to IT consultants and suppliers. So you can hardly blame them for seeing gold in Sarbanes-Oxley. These days, you hear the marketing pitch often: “Don’t view Sarbox as just a compliance issue; use it as a lever to overhaul your systems and processes.” In other words: Launch big IT projects now!

It was interesting, therefore, to hear the CIO of a leading manufacturer deflate the Sarbox hype during a panel discussion at a recent conference. So, she was asked by the moderator, do you view the compliance challenge as an opportunity to proactively make broader changes? No, she said calmly, we’re just going to do the minimum we need to do to pass the legal tests, and then we’re going to move on. Sarbox is a nuisance, she continued, but it won’t be long before everyone’s forgotten about it.

It’s a sensible view, and my guess is that it’s shared by more than a few of her counterparts at other firms – even though few would say so publicly.