“X is the future, Y is the past”
March 20, 2008 4:22 pm GeneralIt’s a little disappointing to see commentators like Matt Asay resort to overly simplistic headline grabbing about “X is the future, Y is the past”. It reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld talking about France and Germany being “old Europe”. There are lots of things that could be the future – smart phones (Linux has 30% market share on smartphones in China), ultra-mobile computing (Linux are market leaders on this), or perhaps something we haven’t thought of yet.
Given the difficulties that you still have getting online over wireless, and the exorbitant cost of monopolist network providers in all the places you might want to connect to the internet when mobile (hotels, airports, planes, trains, …), and the lack of computer penetration (never mind network penetration) outside of the rich, well educated world, allow me to be slightly more pessimistic about Google as the future master of the world.
Master of search, yes. Master of a hell of a lot of personal data (enough to make me nervous), check. Master of online advertising, sure.
But I don’t believe that Android will have a long-term impact on mobile platforms, beyond helping break the wills of telephone operators and giving some more control to handset manufacturers and content creators. I don’t think that Google’s pure online app play will have any lasting success in displacing rich local applications while there is not ubiquitous, worldwide, cheap wireless networking, and much higher worldwide broadband penetration rates than what we currently have in the US and Europe. People like having their data locally, and available when not connected to the internet.
I think that it’s inaccurate to say “X is the future” at this stage of any online company, and when you’ve got a behemoth like Microsoft which controls the rich local apps market, it is neither today nor tomorrow that we can call them “the past”.
March 20th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Agree
March 20th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I did wonder for a moment whether this was going to be a post about whether our beloved window system was going to survive past its twenty-fifth year.
March 20th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Such pronouncements “A is dead, B is the new future” make me think of the radio – radio must have been killed off by a half dozen different technologies over the years.
No doubt it lost it pre-eminence to TV (in the Western world), and is perhaps relegated to alarm clocks and cars, but is still a viable media channel. In the UK, some radio shows have audiences that equal prime time TV (but maybe that’s because TV got killed by ‘the internet’ or video games or youtube ;-).
While some technologies ultimately do die (anyone got a player piano) many others manage to find a successful niche after their bubble bursts (granted the ‘niche’ could be big, just not as giant as when that technology was at it’s peak). Currently desktop ‘thick-computing’ is going through this, and no doubt the next cycle will show that ‘Web2.0’ centric computing overstretched itself in certain areas and something else, whether it’s mobile or a resurgent niche of desktop or something new, will redress the balance.
March 21st, 2008 at 1:08 am
Good analysis. The outcome of the spectrum auction just further solidifies the dominance of the mobile communications duopoly in the United States. As long as the cost of connectivity continues to climb, we won’t be seeing a mobile revolution.