The world and its dog (dogs are well serviced here) seems to be getting on board with the app revolution. It shouldn’t be a surprise. We are a throw-away culture, everything we consume has followed the same path over the years and that path is all about reducing our time spent in consuming and the pursuit of consumption so that we can move on and consume again more quickly than before… except for telly. We even design products with built-in obsolescence as a selling feature – we must be mad!
Its taken the software industry a while to catch up with the rest of the world, but catch up Apple certainly has. With the iPhone and now iPad they are showing more and more that they are not an IT company, they are a marketing company. The whole idea of apps is to nurture this throw-away impulse and give consumers lots and lots of reasons to part with their cash in small amounts, which adds up to lots and lots over time.
So, to the future. Apps are the future – in software anyway. Microsoft had better get this point or they have reached their own point of built-in obsolescence. We, the consumer, want to drop in and out of things quickly. We don’t want to have to learn software – what a ridiculous concept that will become… So, going forward my prediction is that our world will become app-based, or rather mobile based. The current latest tellies already include apps (although not necessarily useful yet) but really that’s kind of missing the point. Allowing your phone to interact with the content of the TV and in fact be the control device for the TV is a better idea.
There’s an app for everything will at some stage be a truth. Of course that goes against what Intel and Microsoft want, they would dearly love to keep progress along Moore’s Law going ever-onward, forcing us all to have extremely powerful machines with increasingly complex software from which they can continue to make a lot of money. In fact, my prediction is that the opposite will happen. We’ll have (relatively) smaller, more nimble devices with far less complex software.