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Evolution is the collective creation of human civilisation. It can be a chance occurrence, or it can happen across
generations with careful design.

In the field of communication, the evolution has witnessed the development of the way of conveying information
from the beacon and telegraph in early times to the mobile communication at a later stage, and then derive the 5G
that we often hear nowadays.

Dr. Wu Jun accurately explained the development from 1G to 5G in his book ‘Information Age’. In the 1G era, technology
and cost limited the ubiquity and usage of mobile communications, and the focus was on voice communication and
the establishment of communication standards. The leader at the time was Motorola. In the 2G era that followed,
digital circuits replaced analog circuits, allowing communication equipment to achieve communication purposes
with smaller size and less power consumption while using dedicated chips. The leader of this era was Nokia.
Compared with 2G, 3G has an order of magnitude improvement in the transmission rate of information, allowing
data communication to gradually rise, but the compatibility between mobile telecommunications and traditional
telecommunications was still a limiting factor. 4G has put more effort into the integration of the two, with a flat
network structure coupled with a reduction in the number of information forwarding and an increase in bandwidth.
The drivers of 3G and 4G were Apple, Google, and Qualcomm. Coming to 5G, its core concept is to integrate the
Internet and communication networks into one network. One of the 5G leaders is Huawei.

The aforementioned points are a brief summary of the evolution of the communications field. What I have learned
from this evolution across the ages is:

(1) Each generation has its leader, and there will be ups and downs as the times change;
(2) Each generation has its own bottleneck, which needs to be overcome by future generations using mentality,
technology, and human nature in line with the times;
(3) Each generation has its own mission to complete, and most benchmark results require the efforts of several
generations to achieve;
(4) Leaders who are overly proud and blindly support the traditional fundamentals cannot escape the fate of being
eliminated, and
(5) Evolution is the result, not the cause.

Likewise, the evolution of an organisation is also influenced by the surrounding trends and circumstances. An
organization that lacks forward thinking and is blindly conservative will face a severe test in today's era of many
choices, even if the organisation does not make fatal mistakes. We have seen Motorola and Nokia, who were leading
the way in the 1G and 2G eras, to succumb to the general trend even if they had mastered the technology in their
eras, and there was a huge contrast between their current market shares of communication equipment and those
during their peak periods. This involves many factors, one of which is the sense of security and pride brought about
by indulging in past achievements. The phenomenon of bloat, utilitarianism and centralisation within technology
companies led to many human-made restrictions on changes, even to the extent of making strategic mistakes that
were out of touch with reality. Ironically, in some of the examples mentioned in Dr. Wu Jun's other book ‘On Top
of Tiles’, technology companies often in their internal environment have energy spent on confrontation between
you and me, building small circles to compete with each other, and directors, advisors, and executives canceling
each other out after achieving success. The organisation is composed of people collectively, and the seeds of the
corresponding results will be planted based on the choice on which area to spend their energy on. The culture and
impression established are the collective karma of everyone.

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