Turns out it was OK for me to be unwell last week. It gave me enough time to ponder some of the major stories of the moment without being compelled to write about them. Whether it was Amazon’s outage, Sony’s network breach or the drama around Apple’s location data collection policies (or lack thereof) — the hue and cry was quite astonishing. I mean, even South Park and Stephen Colbert had to weigh in on Apple’s location problems!
Not that it is the first time privacy, security and reliability have been subject of hot debate. Skype outages, Gmail failures, Facebook going on the blink, and the brouhaha around Facebook’s dreaded Beacon project are some of the media explosions that crossed over from the realm of inward looking tech-media to mainstream media outlets. And I am pretty sure we will keep encountering more of these issues.
Stepping back, when you look at all these instances, you see that in all of them, the common thread was — we the people. Our fears, our desires and our needs were behind the huge outcry around these problems that seemed to impact millions of us. This mainstreaming of technology has opened up new opportunities, but it has and will pose a brand new kind of challenge to companies in Silicon Valley.
If the hue and cry over Apple’s location data collection methodologies is any indication, then are we the people becoming the limiting factor in the evolution of technology and its adoption? Will the idea of what computing can do and what it will be in the future be limited by our collective ability to grok these changes? I mean things aren’t exactly getting less complicated. Apple CEO Steve Jobs put it well when he said:
…as new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education. We haven’t as an industry done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week. I think the right time to educate people is when there is no problem. I think we will probably ask ourselves how we can do some of that, as an industry.
Jobs’ comments, in fact encapsulate the bigger issues at play.
The Tech Side Story
For the longest time, the future of technology has been determined by the building blocks that go into devices. The processors, memory and storage defined how software was written during the PC era. Of course, since big buyers of PCs were large companies, the average consumer didn’t have much say in the matter, though ironically the productivity driven PC revolution was labeled the personal computer revolution.
The early days of the commercial Internet carried this grand tradition — ignoring the actual user of a product in favor of commercial desires of a service provider. You, mom and me had little or no say in how the technologies were used to build a service. However, as the networks spread, the early years of the new century saw a massive consumerization of technology.
Corporations stopped buying, but consumers didn’t. Broadband connections grew. Sales of iPods and computers shot-up and we all wanted digital cameras, video cameras and TIVos. As a result, the balance of power shifted away from companies and technology started to become more personal. However, the first five years of the 21st century were all about objects and how to make them simpler.
With the arrival of the social web companies like Flickr, Plaxo and LinkedIn showed that it was time to think differently about how technologies (web applications) were built, used and more importantly, adopted. The emergence of Facebook and Twitter has only amplified that effect.
The social web is about connecting people. On some networks it is real people (Facebook) and on some networks the web connects assumed identities (Twitter.) If CPU, memory and storage defined the capabilities of storage, in the PC era, then in the Internet era, we saw software being defined by processors, memory, storage and bandwidth.
The Internet era eased the way to the social web. In the social web, the software and with it the frontiers of technology being defined by the marriage of network connectivity, PC-era staples and social identity.
There isn’t really social software, social media or even social networks. What social represents is a new way of thinking about what is as old as us –humans — relationships. Think of this way — the social web mimics the way we are in the real world.
Friends, families, tribes and teams that communicate, collaborate, consume and create together. There is no client, no server, just us. The CPU, memory, storage and the network are mere enablers. In this new kind of social web, the defining characteristic is us.
So when Facebook goes down, we cry bloody murder. If Facebook launches Beacon or tweaks how stuff shows up in our news streams or if we suddenly become shills to our friends — we all stomp our collective feet on the ground, till it starts to shake. In other words, it is not what Facebook can build or how it can use the technology resources. Instead the limiting factor for Facebook is how its 600 million (and growing) people adapt to the changes.
My Mobile, My Way
Over past four years, in parallel to this social web arranged around people and their networks, we have seen the emergence of a new kind of mobile Internet. Smartphones mean that technology that once was the domain of the office is now a constant accompaniment. Mobile phones of today might have innards of a PC, but they are not really computers. They are able to sense things, they react to touch and sound and location. Mobile phones are not computers, but they are an extension of us.
With this revolution, it has become easier to share our moments and other details of our life that have so far been less exposed. The sharing of location data becomes a cause of concern because it is the unknown. The situation is only going to get more complicated — we are after all entering a brave new world of sensor driven mobile experiences, as I wrote in an earlier newsletter. No, this is not science fiction stuff.
Today, I read about State Farm, the insurance company launching a new app that uses iPhone’s built in accelerometer technology in tandem with GPS-based location data to measure your ability to do three major tasks when driving — accelerate, brake and corner. You get a score at the end of the journey.
Of course, for now the results are private to the driver, but what if an insurance company started to keep records of your driving and decided your insurance rates based on your performance. It is great news if you are a good driver, not so good news if you are a horrible one. In other words, the perceived scariness is going to define how we adopt and adapt to this and more such technologies.
While Jobs’ idea of offering better explanations of complex technologies is a good step forward, companies also have to start thinking about the human aspect of their core products. In addition to the core building blocks, a product of tomorrow needs to know its human limits or its human capabilities.
Photo courtesy of Apple via its new iPad 2 clip.
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