Tired Consumers
A friend of mine pointed me to the recent article at MSNBC about the meh reaction. It is true our reactions to the continuous stream of new products and services crying for our attention is muted. The article points to weak economy as one of the reasons that we are not that much excited about replacing the aging stuff with new toys. In my opinion the reasons are somehow different. It is not money but time and skills we invest most. And putting it simply we expect a good return on our investments. In the continuous paradigm shift every new device or service we have to learn how to use it. And the pace of changes is so fast, we almost never fully learn before a new one comes. And at this point it is no longer funny, as we get tired trying to catch up.There is plethora of examples. The very recent one is the Google Buzz referred to in the before mentioned article. The Buzz was introduced last week and after reading the news I was expecting it to arrive on my Gmail desktop. And just after it arrived my first thought was "why do we need just another way to share information?". Does not Google know Facebook is the place to electronically interact with friends in a non binding way? Yes I know Google does not own Facebook, but the Buzz move seems rather stupid. I am already on Facebook and I am not willing to spend my time learning how the Buzz works, how to set up its privacy settings (and what do they mean) and in the end spend time setting a content replication between Buzz and Facebook (as I have set up between Twitter and Facebook).
Similar thoughts I have about the iPad. Friends keep on asking me if I will be using one. I simply don't know. I mean I will probably buy it. But there is no guarantee it will not fall in the bin already full of gadgets poised to improve the quality of life. I do not want another device to carry with me when traveling. At the moment I have one - the laptop, that is very universal. I can do banking and stock trading on it. I can import pictures and post them online using Picasa client. I can read news and I can respond to emails and post to my blogs using a keyboard. I can VPN to my home to check webcams and telemetry. I can keep a backup of my phone contacts in Outlook. And even all those tons of funny flash based crap people forward around via email play fine. Not sure all that can be done with comparable ease on the iPad. And carrying two computers on a trip with two power supplies and cables is pointless. No to mention monetary expense and the learning curve needed. At the moment I do not see the iPad delivering so much better experience on the go. So may be I will just have the basic WiFi-only for home use on the sofa or in the bathroom or in the kitchen...
And speaking of the iPad and portable computing, currently hardware - wise the Lenovo SkyLight is my favorite. It is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon, I called almost four years ago. I had it in my hand at CES, what surprised me was how light it was. If the battery holds the 10-hours promise, it may be a traveler's choice. I only wish it had a mainstream OS, like Android... But you never can have everything in life, can you? Anyway, in 2010 we will see a lot of Snapdragon / Android based designs - smartbooks and tablets.
If we talk about software and learning curve, well, Buzz isn't a good example here. My approach to Buzz was similar to yours - I don't want to learn another tool. But having said that, I've read this post in Buzz. Not in Facebook wehere I wander occassionally, not in Google Reader where there are already tons of content waiting to be read, but in Buzz which seamlessly integrated your Blogger account.
ReplyDeleteYou don't need to learn Buzz. You just keep blogging and twitting and the thing will work. And that's arguably the best Buzz feature.
With hardware the move is more difficult. Still there's no chance to fully virtualize your machine and use any other device as a console only. With software you can use one app as read/write tool and the other may be read-only or write-only (e.g. Blogger-Buzz or Facebook-Buzz integration). There's no additional burden you have to handle because you don't really have to "use" the app to fill it with your user-generated content.
Now, moving this to hardware world is hard because you always expect your device will be fully functional (whatever it means in your specific case). It has to run all the applications you use frequently and store all the data you need.
This would be easily achievable with some virtual machine somewhere in the cloud but I think we're still far away from the point where we would have this kind of solution at hand. After all we need to consider a list of "what ifs" especially when it comes to poor (or lack of) connectivity.
That's by the way something I pretty much expect to read here about - paradigm switch from off-line to on-line. We expected it to happen a couple of years ago already and it didn't happen even though we use web more and more extensively.
Pawel, unfortunately I still do not get this Buzz thing. You say it seamlessly integrated with my Blogger... Far from that... To read your comment and reply I had to go to the source... And my Buzz is already full of my own crap (reposted Google Reader entries) I have to turn off now... No to mention the [J] key does not paddle through the entries... And to be honest I do not see value in having just another place to look for new items to read. Gmail + Facebook has been sufficient.
ReplyDeleteAnd on the paradigm switch - mobile devices are becoming a sort of a read/write cache to the cloud. But we will need this cache for the foreseeable future. Connectivity is great when it works asynchronously in the background. This takes care of latency issues too. When you expect it to be synchronous, the gaps and stalls and chokes will frustrate you.