The Quartz Crisis of Software Engineering
What Swiss watchmaking's fourteen-year collapse and improbable recovery has to say about the question software engineering is implicitly organized around — and what happens when that question becomes unanswerable.
In December 1969, Seiko shipped a watch called the Astron. It told the time to within five seconds a month. Every mechanical watch in existence, including the best Swiss chronometers, lost or gained about a minute a month. The new watch was roughly an order of magnitude more accurate at launch, and within a decade the gap would widen substantially. It cost about as much as a new Toyota Corolla.1
Fourteen years later, Swiss watchmaking employed 33,000 people. It had employed 90,000 the year the Astron launched.2
This is the part of the story everyone knows. The part worth knowing — the part that matters for any industry facing its own Astron moment — is what the survivors did next. They did not make better mechanical movements. They did not switch to quartz. They did a third thing, and it worked so well that today the most expensive mechanical watches ever made are Swiss, and the industry ships roughly half the units it shipped in the 1974 peak for aggregate export value multiple times larger than the 1970s peak.3
