Just for Fun

The Amusement Ride Ahead

Is there anything more obnoxious than business prognosticators? Those self-important types who pretend to know where the insane technology amusement ride will take us? I guess they serve a good function. They populate the panel discussions and keynote speeches of the indistinguishable technology conferences that seem to crop up like unpleasant, inedible mushrooms in your flower bed. People hoping to cash in on technology trends spend thousands of dollars to hear them speak at technology conferences. It keeps an army of hotel workers and food handlers and bartenders honestly employed, so I suppose they serve a purpose.

And now David tells me that I should do one of those "Future of Business" chapters, too. I feel a bit sullied by the thought, but hey, he didn't let me drown while we were boogey-boarding, and if he believes that readers will think the future of business is more interesting than the meaning of life, then I'll just shut up and write.

However.

I'll go on record saying that I've not been a very good predictor of much of anything in my life, as far as I can remember. Did I predict that the little operating system I started writing for my own use would someday be all over the place? Nope. Took me by surprise, it did. My only defense is that nobody else seems to do be doing any better on this crystal ball thing either, and if I was taken by surprise by how big Linux became in the industry, then everybody else was absolutely flabbergasted. So I probably did better than most. And who knows? Maybe through this chapter I will be known as the Nostradamus of our time.

And maybe not. Here goes, anyway.

We can, of course, look to past experience. We can trace in sad detail how, say, an invincible-seeming company like AT&T went limp -- and we can predict that if we stick around long enough, the weeds will overrun those tidy little green buildings in Redmond someday, too. Just as today's hot young starlet will develop wrinkles and sagging breasts, today's business hero will be supplanted by a new, more inspired model; and the hero's company, even if it breaks a sweat reinventing itself -- or whatever they're calling it this month -- will end up sagging and groaning, AT&T-style.

Call it evolution. It's certainly not rocket science. No business will live forever, and that is just as well.

But what is it that actually drives this evolution? Is there some fundamental, inherent evolution of technology that will one day cause computers to take over, leaving the human race behind in the dust, like some people seem to think? Or is it just some random inevitability of progress, a "straight ahead and damn the torpedoes" kind of thing that causes technological advances?

I say no.

Technology is what we make of it, and neither business nor technology will change the basic nature of human needs and yearnings. As with everything else, the evolution slowly but inexorably will cause technology to move away from plain survival through a society based on communication and finally into the realm of entertainment (deja vu alert: Yes, you've seen this theory before in these pages, and, assuming you stick around to the bitter end, you'll see it once more).

Humans are destined to be party animals, and technology will follow.

So forget all the predictions about what technology can do in ten years. That's not very relevant at all. We were able to put a man on the moon thirty years ago, and we've not been back since. I'm personally convinced that is simply because the moon turned out to be a drab place with basically no night-life at all-sort of like San Jose. As a result, people didn't want to go back, and the amount of technology we've amassed in the meantime doesn't mean a thing. The moon stays empty.

What really matters when you talk about the future of technology is what people want. Once you've figured that out, the only remaining question is how quickly you can mass-produce the thing and make it cheap enough that people can get it without sacrificing anything else they want. Nothing else really matters.

A small digression is in order here. What really sells, of course, is perception, not reality. Cruise liners sell the perception of freedom, of the salty seas, of good food and romance of Love Boat proportions. Who cares if the cabin is cramped if you feel like you're free as a bird!

And what does this all mean?^{4}It explains, for example, why people are going so ga-ga over the Sony PlayStation 2, the single biggest piece of technology to hit the store shelves this year. (I'm writing this just days after it was introduced in the United States in late October 2000). Talk about the embodiment of the entertainment society!

It also points out how personal computers have a perception problem. Clearly the PC industry is nervous about game consoles, mainly because they are seen as nonthreatening, fun and cheap, while PC's are mostly seen as complicated and expensive. Sometimes even inimical.

It also makes me personally convinced that if we're still talking in a big way about operating systems fifteen years from now, something is seriously wrong somewhere. This may sound strange coming from somebody whose main claim to fame is writing his own operating system, but the fact is that, statistically speaking, nobody wants an operating system.

In fact, nobody even wants a computer. What everybody wants is this magical toy that can be used to browse the Web, write term papers, play games, balance the checkbook, and so on. The fact that you need a computer and an operating system to do all this is something that most people would rather not ever think about.

This is why a lot of analysts like the notion of devices like the Sony PlayStation 2 that take over a number of the chores of a computer, without having that scary hand-sweat-producing property of being obviously complicated, scary machines. Which is technologically senseless, as we're getting more and more computers into the house all the time like this, while being unaware of how complicated and scary they could be.

So my bet for the next Microsoft would be Sony, if they can just get all the pieces lined up properly. Now I'm not claiming that this is a prediction of Nostradamus-like mindbogglingness (yes, I know that's probably not a real word, but it should be). There are others who would agree with this, but I'm trying to articulate why it is happening.

Not that I'm predicting the demise of the PC, like many have unsuccessfully done before. The fundamental strengths of PCs are still there; they are the Swiss army knife of computers. Overtly complicated enough to scare off people who don't like technology -- complicated exactly because they are not tailor-made for only one thing. That flexibility becomes the very thing that makes them attractive.

And then, the one ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them: communication. Everywhere. You can't live without checking email at least twice an hour? No problem, my email-addicted friend. You can have the slightly guilty feeling of taking the day off at the beach, yet always be in touch with what's going on at work. Remember: What sells is not the reality of being on vacation, but the perception of freedom. Size does matter after all, if only to make all of the technological wonders seem trivial and nonthreatening.

And where is Linux itself, and open source generally, in all this? You won't even know. It will be inside those Sony machines. You'll never see it, you'll never know it, but it's there, making it all run. It will be in that cell phone, which is at the same time acting as your very own personal communications hub for the rest of your electronic widgets when you're away from your wireless local area network.

You'll see. It's only a matter of time. And money.