This is on the order of Keith's refrain concerning the need for a "big new
thingee"... (a bit long and technical but you'll get the idea...
M
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Interesting article from the Guardian,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/feb/11/technology-tablet-smartphones-next-big-thing
Technology needs to be freed up to find the Next Big Thing
Tablets were the last Big Thing, but the potential is there for plenty more,
if cultural resistance wasn't so strong
Tablet computers
Tablets were the last Big Thing, but the potential is there for plenty more,
if cultural resistance wasn't so strong. Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA
Looking for next big wave of products or services, for something as big as
smartphones or, more recently, tablets, we see technology kept in check by
culture.
To qualify as a Big Thing these days, a product or a service, or maybe
something hardly more effable than a meme (think social
networks) has to assume a value in the order of $100bn worldwide.
The value needn't be concentrated in a single company; indeed, the more
boats that are lifted by the rising tide, the better. The revenue from the
Next Big Thing might be divvied up among today's hardware and software
giants or shared with companies that are currently lurking under the radar
of industry statistics.
The $100bn number is derived from a look at Apple. For fiscal year
2013 (started 1 October, 2012), the company will weigh about $200bn
(£127bn) in revenue. To "move the needle" for just this one company, a Big
Thing will need to contribute about $20bn to this total. For Apple execs and
shareholders, anything less counts as a mere hobby (which leads to questions
about the future of the Mac, but I digress).
Using this gauge, smartphones easily qualify as a Big Thing. As Charles
Arthur reports in the Guardian: mobile internet devices 'will outnumber
humans this year'. Initially offered by Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia, and
then given successive boosts by the iPhone (first with the device itself and
then the App Store), it's no exaggeration to say that the size of the
smartphone tsunami surprised everyone.
Even the big four incumbents were crushed by the wave: Palm is gone, RIM is
in trouble, and Nokia has enslaved itself to Microsoft which has yet to
come up with a viable smartphone OS.
The latest Big Thing is, of course, the "media tablet" (as IDC and Gartner
obsessively call the iPad and its competitors). Whatever you call it,
regardless of who makes it or which OS it runs, the tablet is a Big Thing
that just keeps getting bigger. In less than five years, tablets have
attained 10% US market penetration, a milestone that smartphones took eight
years to reach. (See also slide nine in Mary Meeker's now iconic Internets
Trends presentation).
In his 7 February Apple 2.0 post, Philip Elmer-DeWitt offers this Canalys
chart, which shows that one in six "PCs" shipped in Q4 2012 was an iPad:
So what's next? Is there a breakthrough technology quietly germinating
somewhere? What are the obstacles to a self-amplifying chain of events?
I don't think the barriers to the Next Big Thing are technical. The
ingredients are there, we simply need a master chef to combine them.
Smart appliances
This brings us to the broad and fuzzy class of what are sometimes called
"smart appliances."
The underlying idea is that the devices that surround us alarm systems,
heaters and air conditioners, televisions, stereos, baby monitors, cars,
home healthcare devices should be automated and connected. And we should
be able to control them through a common, intuitive UI in other words,
they should speak our language, not the other way around.
This isn't a new idea. For decades now, we've been told the Smart Home is
upon us a fully automated, connected, secured, and energy-saving dwelling.
More than 20 years ago, Vint Cerf, an internet progenitor and now Google's
chief internet evangelist, posed with a T-shirt featuring the famous IP on
Everything pun:
The internet visionary was, and is, right: every object of importance is
destined to have an "IP stack", the hardware, software and communication
link required to plug the device into the internet. With every turn of Moore
Law's crank, the hardware becomes smaller, less expensive and power-hungry,
and thus makes more room for better software, allowing internet (and local)
connectivity to potentially "infect" a growing number of devices. And as
devices become smart, they will "teach" each other how to communicate.
Imagine: you take a new remote control out of the box, walk up to a TV and
press the "?" key on the remote. A standardised "teach me" message is
broadcast, and the TV responds, wirelessly, by sending back a longish XML
file that identifies itself and tells the remote the commands it
understands:
In a language that computers and even humans can process without too
much effort, the TV has taught the remote. Here is where you'll find me, and
this is how you can talk to me. The little computer inside the remote munges
the file and now the device knows how to control the TV
or the five
components of the home theatre, the heater/air conditioner, the alarm
system, the car ...
Now replace the remote in this scenario with your tablet, with its better
UI, processing, and connectivity. Rather than controlling your devices by
pushing plastic buttons, you use an app on your tablet an app that the
device delivered just before it sent the XML file. (You can use the default
app sent by the device, or wander over to the App Store and pay $5 for a
deluxe version with different skins. This is how cottage industries are
born.)
So goes the lovely theory
but in reality we see so-called Smart TVs with
internet connections but mediocre UI; or less-smart TVs that are still bound
to barely intelligent set-top boxes, with their Trabant-grade user
experience. And we control them through multi-function "universal" remotes
that cost as much as a smartphone, but do less and do it worse.
What's missing?
The technological building blocks exist in abundance. There is plenty of
open source software available to help the remote (or your tablet) digest
the This is how to Talk to Me file from the TV.
Even in our deliberately simplified example, there seems to be no interest
in coming up with a simple, open (yes, that word, again) standard to help
appliances tell the rest of the world how to control them. It wouldn't add
much to the cost of the device and certainly wouldn't require hiring rocket
scientists. In other words, the obstacles are neither economical nor
technical; they're cultural, they're keeping the Machine to Machine (M2M)
revolution in check.
We've seen a similar sort of cultural resistance when we consider à la
carte, app-based channels on the mythical "iTV", whether from Apple, Google,
or anyone else. Users would love to pick and choose individual shows and
have them delivered through applications rather than through deaf-and-dumb
multicast streams. App-ification of TV content would provide other "organic"
features: the ability to rewind a live broadcast (without a DVR), easy
searches through programme archives, access to user forums and
behind-the-scenes commentary
The technology and design already exist, as the wonderful 60 Minutes iPad
app demonstrates:
Similar examples can be found on every internet-enabled TV platform from
Google TV to Roku, the Xbox, and others.
Nice, easy, technically feasible yesterday
but it's impossible today and
will almost certainly continue to be impossible for the near future (I first
typed nerd future, a neat typo).
Why?
Because carriers won't allow it. They're terrified of becoming dumb pipes
(the link refers to mobile carriers, but the idea also applies to cable and
satellite providers). Carriers force us to buy bundles of channels that they
package and sell in a tiered, take-it-or-leave it pricing scheme. True,
there is VOD (Video on Demand), where we can buy and view individual movies
or premium sporting events, but a pervasive news-stand model where we only
pay for what we consume is still far away.
The content owners movie studios and TV networks don't like the
news-stand model either. They go by the old Hollywood saying: content is
king, but distribution is King Kong. iTunes made an impression:
movie and TV studios don't want to let Google, Apple, Netflix, or Amazon run
the table the way Apple did with iTunes and AT&T. (That AT&T derived lasting
benefits in higher ARPU and market share doesn't seem to alleviate the
content providers' fears.)
How can this change and, as a result, unlock one or two Big Things? To
retread a famous two-part Buddhist joke, change is a mysterious thing.
Telling people what they ought to do doesn't always work. Still, two
thoughts come to mind.
First, the tablet. We, tech people have always known the tablet was the
right thing to do, and we tried for 30 years without much success.
Three years ago, Chef Jobs grabbed the ingredients that had been available
to all and, this time, the tablet genre "took". Now, perhaps, the tablet
will take its place as an ingredient in a yet grander scheme.
Second, go to an aquarium and watch a school of fish. They move in concert
and suddenly turn for no apparent reason. Somewhere inside the school there
must have been a "lead fish" that caused the change of direction. Perhaps
the fish didn't even realise he was "The One"
destined to trigger the turn.
Who's going to be our industry's fish, big or small, that precipitates a
cultural change unlocking the potential of existing technologies and gives
rise to the next $100bn opportunity?
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