The Death of the PC and the Rise of Us, Computer

I don’t often cross-post things from work, since by day I’m an evil marketing wonk. But when the world crosses a threshold like we just did, it’s worth talking about here as well.

Future historians will look back on March 6, 2008 and say, “This is the day the PC really, officially died,” and “this is the day we began make technology part of ourselves.”

I’m talking, of course, about the opening of the iPhone platform to developers, with the accompanying application marketing channel and venture fund behind it.

Let’s start with this new platform, fully 3d-game-capable and full of more accelerometers and sensors than you can shake a Wiimote at. We’re playing with the SDK already, and it’s stunningly easy to use. Combine this with a distribution channel (iTunes) and a competitor to keep things rolling (Android), and you now have a whole new way to reach 10MM leading-edge, fashion-conscious, free-spending users. Do you think marketers are gonna be stampeding in? Well, like, duh.

But it’s a lot bigger than that. In fact, it changes everything.

Think of how you use your computer today. You sit down, shake the mouse, open the web browser and go to YouTube. Or, if you have a laptop, you drag it out of your messenger bag, plug it into the wall, open the lid and wait for it to find the wireless connection, then do your YouTube/Facebook/Office/Final Cut/Flash/whatever. But, in either case, you separate yourself from the computer when you’re done.

In a mobile-centric world, your computer is in your pocket, it’s always a half-second away from being turned on, and it has many different ways to alert you to its presence. The computer becomes part of you. And when you add highly capable apps for productivity and games, as well as higher-speed data, you now have a constantly-connected, intelligent, extremely high-functioning link to, well, damn near anything in the world.

It’s now trivial to look up information on Google, play games with friends, communicate with voice and photos and video, add metainformation to the growing geographic and regional databases, respond to email, create new spreadsheets–half a million things are now seamlessly integrated with your life, rather than being a car trip or a laptop-startup away.

Let’s extrapolate this out. iPhone-esque technology becomes smaller, faster, ubiquitous. At the same time, future display technology allows us to project data into our eyes, creating overlays on the real world. And, at this point, the distinctions between our own capabilities and those of the network begin to blur. We’re constantly connected. There’s no reason not to use your Google Ambient account. And, in fact, unless you turn it off, it’ll probably work constantly and helpfully in the background, instantly recognizing objects and classes of objects (like cars, faces, friends, and more) to let you know what’s going on with them.

“Wow, that’s a lot of information,” the dinosaurs here say. “And I can see the potential for spam and abuse.”

Yeah, and welcome to the early 21st century. Yes, assimilating augmented reality overlays may represent an order of magnitude increase in the amount of information we have to process. But that’s what today’s millennials have been training themselves for. Watching TV while doing homework, listening to music, and talking to 3 friends via IM is a great start on managing information overload. They’ll treat these augmented realities as part of themselves in very short order.

And that’s something to think about. People tend to guard their personal environment with much greater care than, say, a web page. Google AdSense ads won’t be tolerated when they’re in your field of vision, or even if they’re flittering around the corner of your eye. 3D overlays of fantasy-lands to explore in real space (a la Vinge and Stross) may be a better marketing venue.

But no matter how you look at it, we have turned a corner. As of March 6th, we’ve taken the first step to making computing part of ourselves.

And that changes everything.

March 10th, 2008 /