Over at Mashable, Brian David Johnson from Intel has noted a few of the key themes they think will shape network-connected devices in 2011. His list, as most things about technology these days, emphasizes consumer technologies and use cases:
The screen is the device. We’ll use whatever screen best fits what we want to do and where. Tablets, laptops, smartphones, etc.
The next computing environment = the bed. (?? Yeah.)
Cars
People still love TV
Overall, the predictions aren’t exactly Earth-shattering. However, they do underscore two key trends of the past decade-plus:
Technology enabling work to erode your personal life
For the past several years consumer technologies have been driving innovation back in to the enterprise. Two examples of the consumer-enterprise relationship are, of course, the iPhone and the Blackberry. People with iPhones on their personal accounts started demanding their enterprise IT organizations support them. More important for the 2011 predictions, perhaps though, is the Blackberry precedent. Blackberries enabled work to intrude into our personal lives. As did high-speed broadband and other technologies too.
So, I don’t think we’re yet to the point of holding conference calls at night from bed. And, we won’t see a step-change in car-based working until cars can (and are allowed to) drive themselves (it’s coming, though). But I do think we’ll see continued intrusion of work into our personal lives.
Cheers,
Eric
PS, for a genuine futurist’s imagining of working while on the road, read science-fiction novel Mother of Storms.
This actually sounds pretty cool. RIM’s new tablet, the “PlayBook”, will be smaller than the iPad but is going to have a number of features designed for secure enterprise use. One thing I liked, actually, was the way that their co-CEO turned their lack of apps (vs. iOS) to a positive: “What we’re launching is really the first mobile product that is designed to give full Web fidelity”, thus the tablet will be less dependent on third-party applications or “apps.”
This thread makes explicit a growing thread on IM Roadmap. The Collaboration Business Model holds that collaboration-supporting technology is selected by understanding three areas: knowledge exchange, division of duties, and trust relationships. Modern society is highly mobile – physically, temporally, and generationally. The first two are the most relevant for corporations, entrepreneurs and knowledge workers everywhere. So – why do smartphones (BlackBerry, Palm webOS, iPhone) and tablets (iPad, others TBD) matter specifically for collaboration? Because they give us ever greater ability to transfer knowledge and coordinate activities while, well, mobile. While untethered from our offices and desks and instead at the moment of collaboration. Sitting next to a client, opening a bank account. At the construction site. In the examination room, checking medical records with a patient. Brainstorming product designs around the table with coworkers – in the company cafeteria.
New tools enable ever more sophisticated places and forms of collaboration. They also change the nature of collaboration itself. Collaboration both stretches and shrinks in time. Long-duration collaboration relationships spanning weeks or months with sparse, infrequent interactions amongst participants (as in some open source projects). Or intense, short-lived (nee disposable) collaboration relationships – such as reported recently where volcano-stranded passengers/strangers leveraged social media to help each other find their way home.
Long-anticipated and predicted changes are now finally come to pass. Looking forward to continued exploration of these themes.
Old news by now, but I couldn’t make the post earlier yesterday. It’s great news for Palm, and most especially the Palm community. While my earlier opining that RIM/Blackberry should buy Palm was wrong, the dynamic isn’t far off. ZDNet probably has the best analysis (and here) of the acquisition, and one of their observations is that HP is more likely to use webOS as a further wedge into the enterprise against RIM, than in to the consumer space against Apple. That makes alot of sense as HP has very strong channel partnerships there, and already has the practice of bundling their (now lame) iPaq smartphones with enterprise hardware deals.
Now … maybe we’ll see a tablet running webOS in the future. Would make a great platform for mobile ad hoc collaboration ;-)
This article makes an accurate case that the Blackberry OS (and app store) is what’s holding the Blackberry back these days.
RIM should buy Palm and switch to / integrate their webOS. Palm could be gotten on the cheap, and their UI is at least as elegant as the iPhone’s, and demonstrably superior to many of the Android flavors. webOS is built on a Linux variant, which would leverage RIM’s QNX acquisition. Palm has excellent app store (the “App Catalog”) – and everything on the device works quite elegantly.
One thing …. Specifically regarding this line in the article , “… [Apple's iPhones] have by far the best API of any mobile platform.” Not sure I agree with that one. The iPhone definitely has the lion share of apps, although Android will likely eclipse it before long. However, the webOS development environment is far and away the best API. HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Writing Palm apps is little more dificult than writing modern websites. Their device API is equivalent to the iPhone’s … access to contacts, the camera, GPS data, accelerometer, device attributes, all the goodies. Plus, integration of data amongst the applications is arguably better than in the iPhone.
With Apple’s ascendence over time, somebody had to lose. And without Microsoft’s deep pockets or RIMs corner on the enterprise space, Palm was it. But, Palm is at least equal to Apple’s iPhone in tech, and definitely superior to RIM on many fronts. It could make a great combination.
Cheers,
Eric
Update: here’s a nice ad from AT&T for the Palm Pre Plus. Shows off its UI pretty well.
