2010, What Hasn’t Happened
While it is always fun to pontificate at the end of the year, correctly foreseeing what’s already been done, this year I’m more concerned about what hasn’t happened.
I don’t just mean the slow, painful economic recovery. I do mean the way the whole year didn’t gyrate wildly out of control and pull everything down—yet. Nor am I referring to the stark election turnaround or the always short memory span of voters and their inability to see an analog world in anything but digital terms—Human Nature 101.
But mostly, I am referring to the semiconductor industry. Yes, there were very interesting research developments (one reason I try to track IBM labs and Intel and imec and any i’s I’ve forgotten is the original research that emerges from them). Nothing, however, blow one’s iSocks off. In business news there has been a speedup in mergers and acquisitions, though that seems more the result of cash-heavy companies playing on the tradition of snapping up new technologies or broadening themselves into more growth-friendly markets (IP and EDA, hardware and software). Nope, the earth has not stood still.
The biggest change may have been bridging whole generations of product diversification into tidy three-month marketing windows (which still exceed the attention span of consumers). Today the effective way to introduce technology is to pay popular kids to use it, twitter it and blog it, and hype it into a cultural revolution. As a society we devote much of our genius to building the concept that if you don’t have WHATEVER, you might as well be DEAD (aka, an individual).
As a result, many of our technology paychecks stem from status fads and their monthly access fees. I’m not objecting to getting paid, but I always wanted to do it building a better, safer, cleaner, healthier, nicer planet—not simply yanking the fins on or off the newest fashion mobiles.
Is Progress our only Progress?
In our new, Steamed Pudding Economy, there have been amazing advances in technology, but we really haven’t pulled out a Plum yet. What I’m hoping for is a compelling rational for the future. I am afraid the most insightful of industry seers, Dogbert, may have gotten it right in last Saturday’s strip, “The only things that matter are social networks, games and phones.”
The Mactini Future
<still from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noe3kR8KqJc>
To refute critics that I am not giving new personal technology its due, I’d like to point to a new product review from The Peter Serafinowicz Show Xmas Special on BBC2. It’s lonely on the breaking wave of the future.
The Rugged Past
<still from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEqUyNaSdvg>
It’s not that innovation was not absent, even when I was a kid. The black and white TV tube was plenty colorful back then, and almost as big as the Mactini-Nano. Okay, maybe there is something to look forward to.
Does writing count as a social network?