Holiday Wishes

The following is adapted from the year-end wishes that I shared with the outstanding small company that I am part of. It speaks to the values and culture within our startup.

As we conclude the year, I commend each one of you for helping to make 2012 another great year at ZTEC Instruments. Economic uncertainty has made 2012 more difficult than we expected. The year was challenging, partly due to market conditions, and partly due to our choice to aggressively invest in the wireless test market.

Success in the Future

Today's business environment is more competitive than ever before. Goods and services can be produced anywhere and sold worldwide via the internet. Enabling technology is pervasive and inexpensive, allowing low-capital startups to spring up everywhere. Education, hard work, and creativity are being adopted by cultures across the globe. On average these trends are lifting the world's standard of living, and there are winners and losers. Developing economies are extending prosperity and opportunity to more, and developed countries are under pressure to become more competitive or risk falling back. This is especially important for populous nations such as the United States that must employ many citizens in this highly competitive world marketplace.

Celebrating Opportunity and Those Who Pursue It

After watching the last two week's political conventions, I am left feeling more encouraged and optimistic than ever. It was not the soaring rhetoric, and certainly not the partisan attacks by each side. Rather, it was the speakers and their compelling life stories that uplifted me. Both political parties showcased examples of what makes America great. We saw impressive individuals from both parties, who took advantage of opportunities to make significant contributions.

Think about the common thread that we saw within both conventions. We saw examples of a great society that helps people to help themselves. Both parties celebrated the pursuit of a better life for ourselves and for our children. With assistance from families, from communities, and from government, ordinary people accomplished extraordinary things through scholarship, merit, hard work, and character.

Outliers

In statistics, an outlier is an unusual occurrence that falls outside of the normal statistical distribution. These random and rare occurrences often seem inexplicable. Consider rolling dice and getting snake eyes 100 times in a row.

Malcolm Gladwell's book by the same name, Outliers discusses unusual patterns of achievement and success. In the book, Gladwell identifies logical causes for what would otherwise be considered statistically impossible events. He identifies cause and effect relationships for statistical outliers.

Collaboration, Innovation and 5G WiFi

The IEEE standards association is a fantastic model of collaboration that brings together competing organizations, ideas and interests to advance technology and the framework for innovation. Companies from all over the world send highly talented engineers and scientists to develop standards within IEEE working groups. Competing companies collaborate to develop the standards that enable interoperability, innovation, and ultimately competition between those same companies. The consumer is the biggest winner of this cooperation and standardization. With a common and open standard, the marketplace creates the competitive environment that leads to innovative new products and drives prices down over time.

A standard that you will likely hear more about is the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (a.k.a. WiFi) standard. A new 5th generation (5G) WiFi standard, designated 802.11ac will deliver multi-Gbps data rates. This is significant because 802.11ac will enable faster wireless data rates than most of us now have with our wired 100 Mbps connections. The 802.11ac standard is still in draft form and not expected to be completed until later this year, but already there are 5G WiFi products available. This shows the pace of market-driven innovation.