The Next Big Thing

A wave of technology is breaking against the consumer world.  Although the amplitude is relatively the same, the frequency is increasing exponentially.  It’s so prolific that Best Buy has touted it’s buy back program on recent commercials.  (You know the ones, “3G, 4G, 5G, 6G”...”A new phone is out that’s better than yours”)

The latest and possibly the most influential items tossed our way is the cloud and the tablet.  You might find, as many others do, that there is a cloud surrounding the “cloud”.  A simple definition for the “cloud” was reiterated by the speaker at a seminar in New York I attended a few weeks ago, ‘Any solution that uses another computer through a network’.  Acknowledging that definition implies we’ve been using the “cloud” for years in one form or another.  So why all the hype?  Part of that is a marketing method latched onto by many companies to infuse new fire into older products that have been using the technology and some is the new ways in which it is being used.

What is happening is a shift from reliance on our personal or business computers and the catalog of programs we load on them to simply accessing programs that are built and maintained on another network, in most cases through the internet.  Many enterprise businesses are already eliminating cost of IT personel, servers, backup, hardware upgrades and maintenance by using “cloud” based systems.  It appears this shift is starting to infiltrate the consumer world as well.

The tablet has been a ripple until Apple’s iPad hit the scene.  Apple announced it sold over 7.3 million iPads in the 4th quarter of 2010 alone, raising the number to over 19 million for the year.  The popularity has attracted other big players such as google whose Android platform is now featured on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Dell Streak, Motorola Xoom and soon on devices by Toshiba, HTC and LG according to Ian Paul of PC World.  This is leading some to predict the total sales of tablets to triple this year. That is a flood of tablets entering our media world.  Watch a movie, watch TV, listen to music, read a book and send a spreadsheet all in the palm of your hand.  Not too big, not too small.  It’s somewhat surprising tablets didn’t take off when they were introduced a decade ago.

The combination of these and other trends is changing the way we produce, seek and view media similar to how TV entered nearly every home in the twentieth century.  The continual advances of the internet, cloud computing, tablet technology and mobile access combined with social networks are changing how we work, play and view the world.  And just like TV it is producing both good and bad consequences in many ways.  Let’s hope the good win out.