The importance of Marketing to the engineer

When I first meet my future wife and she told me she was in marketing I quickly explained that I was her slave ... in a professional sense. Engineers are just totally dependent on Marketing to tell us what the customer wants and needs. Once we know that we can go about actually creating the product to meet these desires.

The present according to a past future

Some times a Systems Engineer is called upon to make long term predictions about the future so they can then start the actual process of creating the devices which will then make these predictions come true. Of course predictions can be fought with our own prejudice and wrong headed opinions. Take the famous example of the Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, in 1943, who said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

But every now and then we get close but not in the way we first thought. In 1967 Philco-Ford Corporation came out with a short film called 1999 A.D. which missed by only a decade some of the idea's put forth. Take a look here. Of course we don't have "Split second lunches, color-keyed disposable dishes" but we do have ultra-cool flat screens.