Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC. I was 29 at the time, already three or four years into my technology PR career. In the intervening years I've done a lot of journeyman PR. I've represented countless numbers of average products from mediocre companies… and I've had my few that have been tremendous. One was the first truly portable computer from a company in Mountain View called GRiD. Fortune named it one of the ten best products of the year. Another was an industry first EEPROM from a company formed by really, really bright people with deep Intel backgrounds. I represented the first company dedicated to the development of the first commercial UNIX operating system.

Interestingly, I think I always knew. By that I mean in the first day or so of seeing, touching, and hearing about a technology, a person who does this all the time can get a sense of the future: is it a winner? Obviously anyone using Lotus 123 for the first time just plain knew. More recently, Google Earth gave most people that sensation. MySpace, YouTube… the first truly relational database. You know what I mean, right? In between there were cheaper, faster, smaller printers; smaller, denser disk drives; and lots of other derivative products with a temporary doo-dad advantage. All worthy in many respects but none that moistened people's armpits; none producing that 'This changes everything' sensation.

On Thursday and Friday of this week, I was in meetings with a new client and for the first time in a long while I had one of those rare 'ah-ha' moments. You're thinking, 'You're paid to say that.' Not really. I'm paid to put the best face forward on anything new from a client. If a new idea isn't great and I say so anyway, it doesn't do the product any good and my days as a credible PR professional are numbered.

In this case, this company, filled with people with long CAD experience, believe that some of the most important information in a company is product information. After all, products are what most companies sell, service, support, manage and make. Secondly, they believe this product information ought to be freely shared and allowed to flow openly within and across all major functional departments within an organization. I don't see how anyone can disagree with any of this so far. Next, they know from long experience that the biggest, best, most detailed information about a company's products is vaulted away in a vast store of 3D graphic information, of exacting geometric precision, beyond the reach of all but engineering, product development and manufacturing specialists. Their vision: grant easy, low-cost, and safe access to this product information enterprise wide. Why? Here's where the story gets very, very interesting… where the implications for the future are immense.

You may not know this but in many, many cases, product documentation specialists, industrial design specialists, manual illustrators, service and support people are reduced to taking photographs of finished products to populate repair manuals, user manuals, parts lists, data sheets, assembly instructions, channel communications and the like. Using the photo, illustrators use a system by which they trace the picture and this in turn produces those renderings we've all seen that, well, aren't very useful.

Never mind what this might mean to average people like you and me who want to upgrade the memory in our laptops and have been frusutrated by mere drawings with little or no resemblance to the product we own and with no real reference to which screws get removed in what order. The vision of this company will ultimately change all that. We'll be able to go on line, link to product support, and watch an animation and/or see a set of exacting graphics we can rotate, spin, assemble and disassemble over and over. For corporations, the real benefit is time to market and product differentiation and reduced costs. Today, all of the corporate support functions excluded from the product information have to basically wait until the product is finished and then they have to recreate product information using photos and new drawings. Today, it can take less time to design and build a new product than it takes support people to prepare the follow-on documentation.

Maybe this isn't on the order of magnitude of the IBM PC of 25 years ago which ignited a $200 billion a year business today. But it's up there. It's not a derivative; it's not an incremental improvement. It represents a sweeping change in the way in-depth, exacting, and highly visual product information is made available everywhere all the time. In today's global economy, with users everywhere and manufacturing plants in all farwaway places, this vision stands to change the way products get promoted, sold, maintained, repaired and presented for optimal end use by consumers.

The bottom line is this: I've left countless meetings saying to myself, 'I don't get it. Who cares.' This I get. This I want. And this is one of those rare instances in which I think lots of people will immediately and intuitively understand what's at stake.

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