The Future of Technology

My thoughts on where technology is heading:

• More real-time information: I believe one interesting aspect of Twitter is that it has a real-time flow of information. We are a society filled with people that don’t trust the media and are discovering that we ourselves are the media. I think most people have a desire to share their brilliance and their thoughts with others. We all want a voice in an increasingly noisy world. The voices of all these people combine with professional sources are generating a large amount of data. This information is then subscribed to and viewed by people in real-time. We are coming to expect that the information that we care about flow to us in real-time. Magazines, newspapers, and even TV aren’t real-time enough. Nobody wants to wait for next month’s publication, when they can just Google for it. People don’t even want to wait for the “6 o’clock news”. There are currently efforts underway to aggregate and analyze the flow of information not just from the end user but also from the source. One day we may be able to predict or contain outbreaks of diseases and respond to disasters by simply analyzing the flow of information. Decisions may be based on what a population is doing at a given moment in time. Information is much faster and in such greater quantity that the questions we must ask ourselves are: “How will we use this real-time information?”, “How will we control this real-time information?” and “How will we analyze and make sense of it all?”
  
• More consolidation: Over the years it seems that we are moving toward a more consolidated technology world. I don’t think people want to experiment with different technologies like they did in the past. Apple’s popularity can be attributed to their professional and polish look along with the idea of getting people hooked on their suite of technologies. Of course I am speaking about people that are busy professionals that are more concerned with getting things done as opposed to spending time and money to find the best way to get things done. Ultimately the best way is always changing. Furthermore, the gap isn’t very big between the best way and the good enough way. I think the abandonment of email systems in favor of sites like Facebook is about going into one site to manage a large portion of your life. More features and open platforms that allow users to have a single consistent experience is going to be key for many companies.
  
• More accessibility: We are getting more and more connected devices. We have our cell phones, our TV, our computers, and even our cars. With all of these devices we want ways to access and manage our data. We should be able to view our calendars from home, from work, or from the road. With 3G, 4G, Edge and city wide WIFI we have created the 24 x 7 connected world. With this new world we want to access our data at any time and by any device. We want to view our calendars (and tasks) before we get into the office. All of this is going to require better ways to synchronize and/or access our information at all times and from all places.
  
• Platform: To large degree when you ask the older generation what they think about when they hear “platform”, you will hear things like Windows, Apple, Linux, etc. However, when you ask the younger generation what they think about when they hear “platform” they may say things like Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple (Safari). The younger generation is so connected that they view the browser as the OS. I believe that this is something that will impact our world in ways that we have yet to conceive. We will use the cloud as our storage and our browsers as our client. Google is planning on the web as being the back end and the browser as being the client. I believe that they are going to take this to new heights with the Google OS, but this is only speculation because Google hasn’t released much information on what exactly is the Google OS. However, perhaps the future may prove to swing things in the opposite direction. There are attempts to get out of the browser. With technologies like Silverlight and Adobe Flex perhaps the browser will change to something else. There have also been advancements in Virtual Machines and Virtual Environments. I could see OS’s as just hosting Virtual Sandboxes that can run a wide variety of applications that we access from the web. At this point it is unclear what the future platform will be, but it is clear that it is changing to accommodate web applications.