See Monkey Do

Have you ever daydreamed about what it would be like to be a king or a queen in the ancient world, with slaves and servants at your beck and call? Their palaces and their clothes seemed so fine and expensive compared to what their subjects had to live with, but truth be told you can buy more exotic things at your local Wal-Mart or K-Mart than even the greatest conquerors of history like Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Julius Caesar could have obtained with all the resources available to them. Alexander the Great had to rumble across the landscape in a chariot that had no cushions, no air conditioning, and no satellite radio.

Some Fortune 100 CEOs command more wealth and more employees than all the treasures and armies led by many of the great conquerors of history. When you look at ancient history through the eyes of modern conveniences, the romance of the past doesn’t look so romantic, does it? After all, would you really want to give up your CDs, your DvDs, your coffee maker? Would you want to live without peanut butter and jelly? Okay, maybe you could give up the sandwiches. But there are so many things that even people living below the poverty level can do today that some of the greatest men of the 20th century could not do. Albert Einstein never had a cell phone, did he?

To put things into a more relevant perspective, we take modern conveniences and technology for granted. We quickly forget the struggles that brought those conveniences to our command. Barely 100 years ago the Wright brothers managed to make the first powered air flight. Today we can use the Internet to book a trip around the world. We can pick our own seats on airplanes, ask for special meals, and even pay luggage fees online. It was not so long ago that only travel agents and airline representatives could do these things for us.

Software engineers and consultants like Nicholas Bredimus helped to revolutionize air travel by building the ticketing and scheduling technologies that enabled airlines to service more passengers’ needs than ever before. Those systems have evolved into today’s online services. And the price of such growth has not been cheap. Nicholas Bredimus once noted (along with other experts) how the airlines struggled to close the gap between the revenues they booked and the revenues they collected.

These innovations and others helped spur competition, which sometimes proved more challenging to consumers as well as to airlines. For example, Nicholas Bredimus and other consultants were asked to discussed the process of “poaching” when the Sabre syste was criticized for sharing consumers’ private information with the airlines. It could be said that these kinds of issues are the prices that we must pay for the modern conveniences that make our lives more luxurious and comfortable than those of the richest emperors in the past. At least we can enjoy air conditioning in the summer. Guys like Augustus Caesar had to sweat it out in their expensive marble palaces/