This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "William Perry: The Dawn of Digital Technology" (created 2016-05-19) containing an excerpt of William Perry speaking in an interview/talk. Perry recalls early 1960s Silicon Valley (then Santa Clara Valley), explains why he left Sylvania after its acquisition by GT&E—citing frustration with corporate bureaucracy and a desire to pursue the emerging digital/semiconductor era—and describes the "liability of leadership," where incumbents struggle to adopt disruptive technologies. The clip includes a short exchange with an interviewer (labeled SPEAKER B).
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This was back in 1963, before there was a Silicon Valley. It used to be called Santa Clara Valley. When Cupertino, instead of having Apple, had apricot orchards. And when Mountain View, instead of having Google, had truck farms. The area was so much different then, you can hardly imagine it. When you could buy a lovely new 4-bedroom, 2-bath house for $25,000. So the world was very, very different then. But in particular, people were not going out and starting companies. The idea of a startup, the idea of a Stanford graduate rushing out and starting up his own company was just unheard of. Everybody worked 10, 15, 20 years in another kind of really plan to make their career doing that. So back to your question, why did I leave? I had a very good job with a very good company. And there are two reasons. I just got annoyed by the administrative apparatus which was on top of me. Sylvania, which is the company originally I'd worked for, had been bought by GT&E, which is a big electronics company, a big behemoth company. And with that came a whole set of procedures and processes. Just pain in the neck as far as I was concerned. And the second thing that happened about that time was that the digital age was starting. To talk to this audience that the digital age is starting would seem hard for them to imagine. But just to put it in context, all of the military equipment, 99% of the military equipment, still had vacuum tubes in it. And it was a very, very different world. But the digital age, you could see, was going to change everything. I wanted to introduce that big time into what I was doing in my laboratory. The parent company, Sylvania, was the world's largest manufacturer of vacuum tubes. And they understood that semiconductors were going to make a difference. They had a semiconductor laboratory. It was very clear to me that they could not seize that opportunity. It's what I called then the liability of leadership. If a company has a leadership position in a particular field or a particular technology and a new disruptive technology comes around, that company almost never is able to seize the new opportunity, even though they see clearly what the opportunity is. It's like they have to kill their own baby to do that. And why is that? It's psychological. It's psychological. Psychological.
Yeah. In the leadership of the company.
In the leadership of the company. They've so much invested psychologically and and financially also in their current products, they cannot really grasp the idea of bringing along a new product to kill the one that's been successful for them.
