"In IT, Sell the Shave, Not the Razor", by Isaac Cheifetz, Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 13, 2004

Is information technology an industry on the decline? It is now nearly five years since the dot-com bubble imploded in April 2000. Month by month, the future of the software industry becomes clearer.

Will there still be a software industry as we knew it? It's easy to forget that independent software corporations were rare until the release of the IBM PC in 1981. Previously, software generally was distributed free to corporations buying mainframe or mid-range computer hardware. Individual businesspeople did not buy software, and consumer computers did not exist aside from hobbyist kits.

In some ways, the progress of the past 50 years in IT corresponds to the history of shaving, both technologically and socially.

Men have been shaving with sharpened flint since prehistoric times and with long-handled metal razors since ancient Greece and Rome. But the danger of accidentally cutting one's throat was real. Until the 20th century, rich men hired professional barbers to shave them daily -- working men were more likely to trim their beards themselves or shave on special occasions.

With the rise of the office workforce in the late 19th century grew the desire for a safe, affordable shave. The safety razor, with its narrow strip of exposed blade, had been invented in 1762. But this blade, like the long-handled straight razor, required sharpening.

King Gillette conceived of the disposable safety razor in 1895, patented it in 1901 and took it to market in 1903. Gillette's safety-razor system soon was selling millions annually.

Gillette's brilliance was the concept that launched a thousand business school cases: "Sell the shave, not the blade.” To make his innovation accessible to a mass market, he priced the razor artificially low, making it affordable for any worker wishing to appear professional.

It was the lifetime purchase of custom, disposable blades, for pennies each, that guaranteed Gillette a long stream of profits. His business model is considered a classic for its simple brilliance in launching a technology to a mass market and embedding planned obsolescence into a product life cycle.

The history of information technology has several interesting parallels with that of shaving:

Of course, comparisons between razor blades and information technology work only to a point. Shaving is a discrete process with a beginning and an end, while processing information is unbounded. Some scientists consider the universe itself to be a massive information-processing engine.

But from the standpoint of market adaptation, both processes have gone from specialty item to mass market to emphasizing the end result more than the tool; a closer shave, or a better-managed business.

Shaving commercials for years have promised a closer, more consistent, shaving experience -- or in Six Sigma terms, a lower statistical variance in critical to quality attributes.