Who's to Blame for the Relatively Slow Pace of RFID Adoption?

I was speaking with the CEO of a midsize RFID company last week. He complained about the slow pace of adoption of radio frequency identification technologies, and put the blame for this problem squarely on the shoulders of end users. "Companies have become too conservative," he said. "CEOs are afraid to miss their quarterly numbers and they don't want to take chances. Innovation has disappeared." I offered a different take, however. First, I said, the pace of adoption might not be any slower than for other technologies. The PC was invented around 1980, yet it wasn't until the mid-1990s that sales really began to accelerate. Passive UHF RFID was introduced in 2005, and we won't hit the 15-year mark for that technology until 2020, so adoption might be on a similar path to that of PCs.