Some Time Technology IS Harmfull: 10 Weirdest Deaths by Technology

Technology is supposed to make our lives better: our meat easier to chew, our water easier to carry, our ox carts easier to move. But all too often we weak, squishy, meat sacks of the human variety find ourselves on the wrong side of innovation.

The result? Deaths by tech that are almost too absurd to be believed.

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Death by Peg Leg

What's worse than being beaten to death by an angry mob of your fellow countrymen? Sir Arthur Aston, Royalist commander of the garrison during the Siege of Drogheda, found out in 1649. It's being beaten to death with your own wooden leg because people think it has gold hidden inside. [Berkshire Royal History - Image: Fitnews]

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Death by Ball Lightning

Professor Georg Wilhelm Richmann of Saint Petersburg, Russia, was a pioneer in the study of electricity and among the first to perform electrical experiments. He also became the very first person on Earth to die by those experiments when he was struck in the head by a globe of ball lightning in 1753. [Physics Today - Image: Sarah Clark / Shutterstock]

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Death by Beer Flood

Swimming in beer is not nearly as fun as it sounds. In 1814, seven people died when brew vats at the Meux and Company Brewery in London broke and spilled 1,468,000 liters (388,000 gallons) onto city streets, drowning some, fatally injuring others, and even giving one guy alcohol poisoning. [Badass Digest]

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Death by Train

Mary Ward is the holder of another macabre first. In 1869, she fell from the passenger car of a train she was riding and was crushed beneath the wheels. Per an account from the King's County Chronicle of September 1st, 1869,

The vehicle had steam up, and was going at an easy pace, when on turning the sharp corner at the church, unfortunately the Hon. Mrs. Ward was thrown from the seat and fearfully injured, causing her almost immediate death. The unfortunate lady was taken into the house of Dr. Woods which is nearly opposite the scene of the unhappy occurrence, and as that gentleman was on the spot everything that could be done was done, but it was impossible to save her life.

She was the first person to ever die in a road accident involving motorized transportation. Oddly enough, her younger cousin Charles Algernon, helped design and build not only the train car that killed her but also went on to create the steam turbine. [Offally History - Chen.Z / Shutterstock]

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Death by Molasses Wave

If you thought beer was bad, you should see what molasses does. In 1919, 21 people died and another 150 were injured when a 2.3 million gallon tank of the brown goo exploded and unleashed a 35 mph wave of sticky death through downtown Boston. [Wikipedia]

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Death by Criticality

In 1945 nuclear scientist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. broke the first rule of the Manhattan Project —he accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide onto a plutonium sphere. When the two elements met, the plutonium went critical and released a lethal dose of ionizing radiation. Mr. Daghlian Jr. holds the dubious distinction of being the first person ever killed in a criticality accident. [MPHPA]

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Death by Explosive Decompression

The Soviet cosmonauts Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev are the only three men in history to die outside of the Earth's atmosphere. The trio perished when the Soyuz-11 spacecraft accidentally depressurized during reentry in 1971. [Wikipedia]

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Death by Robo-Arm

Robots may be just starting to take our jobs but they've already taken our lives. In 1979, Robert Williams died from massive head injuries inflicted by a one-ton factory robot at the Ford Motor Co. plant where he worked. [Newsbank - Nataliya Hora / Shutterstock]

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Death by Helicopter Rotor

Boris Sagal, Ukranian film director and father to Katey "Peg Bundy" Sagal, died in 1981 while on the set of the World War III TV miniseries he was directing. He accidentally walked into a helicopter's spinning tail rotor and instantly decapitated himself. [New York Times]

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Death by "Unbreakable" Window

This is what happens when we place too much confidence in our technology. In 1993, Garry Hoy, a Canadian lawyer fell 24 stories to his death because the "unbreakable" windows that his firm had installed didn't, in fact, break when he threw himself against it during a demonstration for visiting law students—but the molding around the glass did

Who Will Own 2013 In HR Technology?2012 to 2013 comparison

1987:  Bloom & Wallace and PeopleSoft Founded

1987 was a big year in the history of HR technology.  That’s the year I founded my solo consulting practice, but Bloom & Wallace warrants little more than a footnote.  Much more important in the history of HR technology, 1987 was the year that PeopleSoft was founded by Dave Duffield and Ken Morris.

PeopleSoft changed the way that HR leaders thought about technology by giving them the ability, without programmer involvement, to add a data element here, write a report there, and use the software directly without a data entry shop.  But PeopleSoft also changed the way in which software company cultures were created and sustained, and that may have been just as important as the contributions that PeopleSoft made to the technical foundations of HRM software.

Building upon the foundations of their last company, Integral Systems, Dave and Ken’s PeopleSoft challenged the then conventional wisdom that only mainframes could run the HR and payroll applications of large organizations.  With hindsight, we now know that the then dominant pre-PeopleSoft vendors, including Tesseract, Genesys, Integral, MSA, Cyborg and more, went from dominant to chopped liver practically overnight — and they never recovered.

All these code bases and their historical peers live on in the back rooms of various aggregators for their still meaningful maintenance revenue streams.  But their heyday ended when PeopleSoft changed customer expectations, buyer behaviors, and our perceptions of how much fun it could be to hang out with an enterprise software vendor.

For all the bad habits that PeopleSoft’s flawed data and process designs brought to HRM for the last twenty-five years, we learned a ton from this company and its software architecture.  And many customers (not to mention industry watchers) shed a tear when Mr. Ellison succeeded in his hostile takeover of PeopleSoft in 2005.

2012:  Workday’s Year

When someone writes the history of the next twenty-five years of enterprise computing, I think that they’ll mark 2012 as just as important as 1987 for HR technology.  It would be nice to think that they would be celebrating the 25th year of my solo consulting practice, but no such luck.  Rather, 2012 will go down in history as the year that SAP and Oracle became more concerned with newcomer Workday than with each other — and with considerable  justification.

From the surprise Saturday announcement in December 2011 of SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors, and the strategic about-face that marked their all-in commitment to true SaaS,  to the very much expected acquisition of Taleo by Oracle in early 2012, we’ve been struck by how much of the coverage of these two bastions of enterprise software has been about the real or perceived threat of that upstart Workday.  And you only had to listen to Larry Ellison’s comments on Oracle’s last quarterly earnings call to know just how focused he is on Workday as a competitive threat.

Not only have discussions/coverage of Workday dominated the HR technology landscape this year, but discussions of Workday have included everyone from financial analysts to cloud aficionados, and from SaaS pioneers likes Salesforce.com (with whom Workday is deeply partnered) to the computer science super geeks.  And Workday customers — let’s not forget that customers are the folks who really matter in the HR technology industry — have added their voices to this discussion, supporting Workday with their enthusiasm, published case stories, and intense collaboration.

2013:  Who’s On First?

But what about the future?  What stories will dominate the large/global market, core HRMS/TM and related HR technology conversations in 2013?

• Will Workday’s momentum continue to build as  industry observers and buyers appreciate more fully the considerable moat they’ve built with their architectural innovations, organizational culture, customer collaboration and expanding functional footprint?
• Will customers residing on aging ERP/HRMS platforms consider fully their true SaaS options, including Workday, when they realize that moving to their current vendor’s next generation platform will be just as much of a new implementation as moving to Workday or another vendor’s next gen HRMS/TM, especially if they plan to get any business value from these investments by revisiting their business rules, processes and data designs?
• Will Oracle commit themselves completely to a true SaaS future and to all the customer benefits beyond TCO savings that go with it?  With they bring all of their considerable resources to bear on driving a true SaaS future for their extensive and maturing Fusion product line?  Will they achieve the deep integration needed across their Taleo and Fusion assets?
• Will SAP deliver a true SaaS HRMS/TM which includes an all-in SaaS payroll, going beyond hosting their on-premise payroll application?  Will Employee Central’s evolving design and broadening functionality be deeply integrated with SFSF’s talent management capabilities?
• Will Infor’s investments in their own true SaaS HRMS/TM capabilities emerge as a major contender for larger/global organizations?  Will they achieve the architectural innovations, deep integration, customer collaboration, and pricing advantages needed to challenge the market leaders?
• Will ADP’s (with Vantage) and Ceridian’s (with DayForce) investments in their own next generation true SaaS HRMS/TM for larger/global organizations demonstrate strong enough TM and global capabilities, as well as deep enough integration and architectural innovation to compete head to head with their ERP/HRMS competitors?
• Will it matter that vendors that offer only an HRMS/TM when the installed base of ERP/HRMS customers look around for their next generation move?  Will that move be limited to the next generation from ERP/HRMS vendors or will buyers be willing to piece together their HRMS/TM of choice from one vendor and the rest of their ERP suite from another?
• And what about a range of other potential HRMS/TM market disruptions?  Will Microsoft get serious about HRMS/TM and buy one of the more capable middle-market providers?  Will a non-US-based HRMS/TM vendor land on our shores with real market impact?  Will Kronos go all-in with a true SaaS, full-scale, global HRMS/TM for larger organizations?  Will SilkRoad or SumTotal or Brand X deliver deep integration, scale up for larger/global organizations, advance their architectural and build-out commitments to include a global payroll engine or ???  Will any of these vendors — or others not mentioned here — achieve an architectural or product vision breakthrough that we won’t know about until we see it?

Of two things we can be certain.  2013 is not going to be dull in our neighborhood at the intersection of HRM and IT.  And InFullBloom appreciates your readership and will do our best to an eye on these developments and many more as 2013 unfolds.