Techno Musings

Well in a few short days it will be the year of Hitachi’s 100th anniversary.  There actually is a pretty cool interactive FLASH presentation here, hosted in India, that showcases some of Hitachi products and includes a nice TV Commercial to boot.  Hitachi’s century long history means that we are one of the few technology companies that has been through the very beginnings of the electrification of the world, up to today with novel products and R&D activities that push the boundaries of innovation.

To begin showing the breadth and depth of Hitachi’s R&D spirit, over five posts I’ve pointed out many interesting Hitachi Innovations, but I’ve only just scratched the surface.  Links to each of the five posts are listed below.

• Post 1 - Hitachi’s approach to organizational physics
• Post 2 - a Hitachi employee’s discussion about Hitachi around the world
• Post 3 - an advanced image search system called Gazopa
• Post 4 - a look at Tactix a high performance streaming OS
• Post 5 - a discussion on Hitachi’s research into robotics

The image at the left is a portion of a timeline including some of Hitachi’s interesting products and R&D efforts. (The total timeline can be found here.) From our humble beginnings in 1910 up to today we’ve been able to be involved in high speed rail, experimental fusion reactors, robotics, nuclear power plants, information technology, and on and on.  I hope that you have been following along in my series which I mentioned above as there is a theme I want to point out with respect to Hitachi’s Spirit of Innovation: we pay extreme attention to the fundamental details.  I think that four of my five posts point out Hitachi’s unswerving attention on very fundamental things.  Whether it is the fundamental approach to storing an image search index, a specially tuned streaming OS, looking at the natural world for examples to help with robotics, or pondering how to measure intangible things like organizational gravity centers Hitachi pays considers deeply about the fundamentals of our offerings.  It allows us to do more with fewer resources because we have the capability and tenacity to look all the way down to the basic materials used to produce a technology.  (As an aside, I own a Giant TCR carbon fiber bike.  It is way smooth and extremely fast. One of the chief reasons for the extreme performance on Giant’s carbon bikes, is that Giant controls the entire process of making the frames.  In short they too pay attention to the fundamentals all the way down to the basic materials their bikes are made from.)  So when you are next thinking about a Hitachi product please do not forget the spirit of this 100 year young company that fundamentally cares very deeply about how it makes the things you use.