Never say never to technology

Have you ever been reluctant to move with high tech, or kept delaying your decision to embrace innovation? It is not the wisest approach. I know better.

There are very few rules that you can follow blindly. “Never say never to technology” is one of them. Never mind the rare exception where adopting a technological innovation does not lead you to the expected results or proves to be a passing fad. In the overwhelming number of cases, going with the trend pays off and is the right, the only way to go.

Family, friends and colleagues think of me a tech head. After all IT is what I do for a living. And yet, even I have had my share of hesitating in the past. Thinking back of it all today makes me smile.

In the early 1980s when I was still a fresh graduate, a friend showed me an early Apple Macintosh computer. He was controlling the screen with a small object in his hand he called “mouse” that let him move another thing on the screen called “cursor”. I was not convinced. I told him that I was a very serious computer engineer, knee deep into complex programming and big machines, and that I had no time for games. The mouse — an innovation back then — would never make it in the professional world I thought. Of course it didn’t take long before I learnt how wrong and how “conservative” I was. The rest as they say is history.

Circa 1995, my good friend Marwan Juma, a renowned computer and technology specialist, who a few years later became Jordan’s minister of information technology and telecommunications, was launching the first e-mail service in the country. We met at a technology show in Amman and he offered me a free e-mail subscription. My first reaction was “I don’t really need e-mail now. Maybe later I will consider it…” He insisted saying: “I really think you should have it now, for sooner or later you are going to need it badly, and you better be among the first ones in Jordan by subscribing right now, today”. I was wise enough to accept the equally wise offer. When I think that I hesitated before giving in!

It also took me a while to get a Facebook account, though social networking really is a slightly different story. I refrained till I had to help clients to manage rather intricate, somewhat technical aspects of dealing with Facebook like placing ads for example and paying for them. So I created an account just to learn how it all worked and of course I ended up checking posts by family and friends. I rarely upload anything myself these days and I don’t check my Facebook page every day, but hey, I do have an account.

On the other hand I have never hesitated to get the latest smartphone the first day it was available on the market. I also was into cloud storage and computing from the early days and I still find it one of the most fascinating, most useful aspects of living with IT. One thing is sure; you would never get bored by closely following technology and acquiring innovation the minute it is there.