If you listen to the VC that Tim Bray is discussing, you’re going to lose all your money.
One of the advantages of experience — though it is overrated in many ways* — is that you see the same things happen over and over again.
Back in the 90s, the “network is the computer” was the conventional wisdom. That was of course completely wrong and many people collectively lost billions of dollars following this fallacious line of thought.
It’s about to happen again with mobile.
No, I don’t think mobile is going away, though I mostly wish it would.
It’s just that a tiny-ass cell phone screen with no truly usable keyboard is not going to replace for people who actually need to get work done a fully-loaded workstation with two 24+ inch monitors. Not gonna happen. Ever.
What will happen as it has many times in the past is that the market will bifurcate, and it will largely bifurcate along lines of intelligence/socioeconomic opportunity (which often reinforce one another positively and negatively).
What I mean is that people who are intelligent enough to handle it will still use a keyboard and a real computer and thus be vastly more productive than those who never learn to do so. Hell, it’s already happening. I see interns come in already who can barely use a computer and they are pretty hobbled compared to those who can. And slow and unproductive. And no, they can’t and never will be able to get their work done on a cell phone. Most of the tools I use in my daily job cannot and never, ever will run on any phone.
So unfortunately what the future will bring is probably 70-80% of the population who can really only use a phone and have even fewer real-world job skills than they do now. They can’t type. Can’t really use a spreadsheet. Can’t code (as coding on a phone is impossible and again, always will be) and have hardly anything to bring to a workplace besides their manual labor.
The corporate office will again resemble the 1990s, where those with real computer skills had huge and measurable advantages over those who did not (and no, using “mobile” to do things won’t fill this role; any moron can learn to use mobile apps in 10 minutes or less).
There will again be the 20-30% who can use a real computer and a useful keyboard. Who understand spreadsheets and maybe even how to write a script or even how to develop software (even if it’s just macros in Excel). Who can adapt quickly to new tasks and not wait for some brain-dead “app” to baby them along.
In other words, the drooling masses will have their mobile phones and be basically skill-less in the corporate world. And the rest will be able to get useful work done in the real economy.
Which group do you want to be in?
*Experience is overrated because most people have experiences but don’t learn a damn thing from them.
The Internet of Things: No thank you, I don’t want my fridge, thermostat, or lights connected to the “cloud” or vulnerable to hackers.
The Future of Productivity: No fuckhead, you obviously don’t even spend a marginal amount of time working because the human eyeball, hand, and spine isn’t going to be able to take working on a smartphone/tablet for 8+ hours a day. Also touch screen everything is way more disgusting than a keyboard.
If it’s not clear, the above are my reactions to this VC Benedict Evans’ prognostications.
That’s about what I thought too about Evans, but I’m trying to be nicer. Trying. Not sure it’s worth the pain, though.
I suspect it’s less about what we want than about what the industry wants us to want. For the longest time the auto industry wanted us to want trucks more than cars because the safety standards were a little more lax for trucks. They want us to want mobile devices more than PC’s because the former are more spyware-ridden by default, while the latter are “general purpose computers,” assuming treacherous computing isn’t yet fully implemented. By the same logic, when we do use mobile phones, they want us to want mobile apps more than we want mobile websites, because the former present more spyware opportunities. It certainly can’t be development cost. Android SDK has a much steeper learning curve than almost any web development stack, and there’s a fee to even be an iOS developer.
And why is cloud computing even a thing? I’m writing this comment on a Xubuntu box with a Model M keyboard attached (that you’ll have to pry from my cold, dead hands), and a tethered pre-paid cell phone. Certainly hard disks are more cheaply available to me than Internet connectivity, and many times faster than 4G, and 1TB is my 5GB monthly 4G cap times 200. Dog only knows how many terabytes (petabytes?) worth of hard disks I could buy with a year’s worth of Comcast bills. Until recently every trend in storage caching was highly predictable and a function of speed and cost. It seems now that the person is the product and not the customer, control is at least as big a variable in that as speed and cost. That’s why the mobile operators now waive all data caps for streaming from commercial entertainment industry venues. Perhaps you should cut a deal with some producer to somehow steganograph your blog content into some Hollywood production so I can read it for “free”…
Lori — I think you are perfectly correct that the industry is driving us to mobile due to the greater ability to force tracking and just having control in general, both platform-wise and the cognitive shaping ability it gives them (since most app stores only allow “acceptable” content).
PCs were a complete anomaly with how much power and control a user had. Such a thing will not be allowed to happen again.
It’s just incredibly sad to watch it all get taken away, though.