Retrofrogging
Reading this interesting account of a session at Supernova07 (no joke please), I ran across this “retrofrogging” term used by Clay Shirky:
“There’s also retrofrogging. We had such great copper that we now lag the world in broadband. That was our Minitel.“
I tried to google the term and nothing else showed up, although I found it exquisitely intriguing (even here). I guess it simply refers to innovations that push in a certain direction when new iterations or disruptions have challenged it. The implicit example for this can be determined by the “frogging” part: frogs = french people…. who developed the Minitel, a pre-Web online service that allowed to do all sorts of things (ebanking, chat, IM, forum, etc.)… which became an impediment for the adoption of the Internet in France.
July 4th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
I think it comes form the word “leapfrogging” only backwards.
The concept may be applied to organisations too. Those which are ahead of the market and are sucessful with a first wave of technology, may not be able to adapt in time when the second wave comes along, so they have to gear up for the third.
July 4th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
It’s clearly supposed to be the reverse of ‘leapfrogging’ meaning to jump ahead like a frog.
Maybe _you_ are joking?
July 4th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Yes, it looks like leapfrogging but I found the idea of the minitelfrogging hypothesis very self-revealing.
Sorry about it, I’m not an native english speaker