I have been watching the long unavailable The Machine That Changed the World series. It’s probably the best thing I have seen about the development of the computer, and addresses social and business/marketing concerns better than most of these. Everyone reading this must watch it immediately (now he also has an H.264 version for download).
There is a general story arc (so far, I have only completed episode 3) that computers are about number processing. To talk to the first ones, you had to understand math and electronics, then just the intricacies of unforgiving early programming, and so on. The GUI, supposedly, works because it emulates existing principles where people know how to look, point, touch, drag, stack and group, etc.
From this, we are told the next inevitable step is virtual reality, or some sort of – probably immersive – 3D environment. Because that’s even closer to what people know and manipulate naturally. So I ask why have such environments made practically no headway (in adoption at least) in the past decade or so?
Well, I just thought, it is actually here. We have solved this, inadvertently, by approaching it from the other end. Instead of building a reality into the computer, we moved computers into reality. Mobile computing (and robust networks) lets us access information sources from anywhere, and look up information about the environment. Some sort of ad hoc ubicomp will make this much more so, and much more useful, eventually.
Earlier today I went and talked to the local police department about the technology in their cars (much more about this soon enough). It’s a dream of mobile communications and context; location is used to dispatch automatically, videos are uploaded (and intelligently tagged) automatically as soon as the car pulls into the parking lot at the end of a shift, and much more.
While this takes up several cubic feet in a car, much of the same stuff is available now in much tinier – even handheld – formats.
And then I read about people loosing their faith, to one degree or another, and wonder why it’s not that obvious or clear. What can we do to make everyone understand that the future is in the palm of their hands? Just keep writing blog posts?
Well, as I have said before, the operators have the best opportunity, so maybe it is an uphill battle. But on the other hand, much of the technology is available. Get out there and design an app, evangelize on the value of mobile, push for that extra bit of good experience, make the products you work on useful /and/ usable. Make the boss, the marketing guy, the client, understand there is no point in waiting for the next big thing, now is the time to bring those ideas forward.
As usual, I have no magic solution (and while it’s not the iPhone, it’s not not the iPhone either), but have to believe that some day all these small steps we’re experiencing, and developing, will reach a critical mass and everyone will suddenly wonder how they got along assuming these little devices were just phones.