The revolution is about iteration

It took me almost two years, but I now see why, where, and how Apple, or rather iOS, is doomed.

Don't get me wrong. It isn't going anywhere, and for Baby Boomers, and anyone who grew up with a keyboard, Apple will be your 'transitional item' (aka. blankey) that you can grip white-knuckled to cope with your fear of technology. 

Yes, you will definitely fear technology as it advances. The pace is increasing all the time, we all know that. But that pace will become frighteningly fast and the only ones who will be able to keep up are the children born into the Touch generation.

Apple brought about this revolution, but it can't control it, and more to the point of this post, it cannot keep up with it.

Google is no angel, and yes, they do Evil, they're a corporation, but they get Beta and they get iteration in a way that is beyond the Apple mindset of pursuing perfection.

Perfection is something you work on when something is timeless, like art or music. Technology cannot be perfected because perfection requires reflection and pacing.

People don't actually perceive speed -- the Earth is hurtling through space at an unimaginable pace but it goes unnoticed. We perceive acceleration. When something is accelerating quickly our brain says "wow that's fast!" If a car accelerates slowly from 100 mph to 120 mph over the course of even 10 seconds, we won't notice the change at all, but if it accelerates from 100 to 120 in under 3 seconds, we'll think it's going 150 mph.

The acceleration of technological advance is going to leave us breathless. Apple's strive for perfection is going to seem downright plodding in the coming years. This will be a tremendous comfort to all those who are scared of this breakneck pace, but to those who are born into it, ADD won't begin to describe how they will fidget with impatience. 

Google doesn't understand people, nor does it understand art, but it understands algorithms and code better than anyone else in the world. It iterates almost flawlessly. The best way to keep up with the kind of technological change we are talking about is to iterate. as. fast. as. you. can.

Safari, Explorer, and Firefox just cannot keep up with Chrome's rate of iteration. This is the writing on the wall. 

You know what tipped me off: The Xoom. It's a crummy tablet; better than any other android tablet out there, but still crummy, not even close to the iPad 2. Did you see what Google did with the Xoom at Google I/O? Maybe you missed it. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was a symbol of things to come. Google is being held back by the hardware, by the OEMs. As soon as something half-decent shipped, they started surging forward. For every millimeter of progress the Android OEMs make, Google will be leaping forward.

Apple's only hope is to learn to iterate faster. Even so, no matter how fast it iterates, it can't keep up with a company who never plans to make it out of Beta. Google will perfect nothing, and that is, sadly, what is going to leave Apple in the dust. 

I'm a little sad for what we are going to lose along the way.

Who benefits? I'm not sure its the user

I personally would've preferred to see Microsoft+Facebook square off opposite Apple+Google.

The way I see it, Google are engineers, Apple are artists. Yes Apple does good engineering work, and Google can produce nice UI, but I'm talking about when they're playing to their strengths.

Watching Google and Apple duke it out makes me sad that I can't have them both in one awesome product. Think about the integration and synching of the cloud with the simple elegance and usability of iPhoneOS.

If we need some industry bad-guy to spurr ingenuity and innovation, couldn't it have been Microsoft and/or Facebook?

I don't want to have to choose between Apple and Google. I want to see their products integrate smoothly.

In the end, I'll probably have to go the route of iPad + Android smartphone. But I'd rather have fully integrated google services on iPhone.

Maybe I should count my blessings that Microsoft wasn't invited to this party? Now how do we make Facebook irrelevant?

[I guess Twitter gets to be the kid who's always picked last.]

Empower yourself

Many people are discussing whether social networking is good or bad for us.

That's the wrong question. The right question is: Are the technologies you are using empowering you?

The question becomes what do I get out of the technology I'm using? It isn't a selfish question, it's a matter of pragmatism.

Blogging is great when it: (1) Gives a platform to express your ideas (2) Provides a means to broadcast those ideas (3) Allows you to receive feedback on those ideas and finally (4) allows you to organize your thoughts so that you can eventually present them in a more structured format. [The last step happens when the blog becomes a book or a startup or a project.]

Twitter is great when it (1) lets you carry on a conversation that should be overheard by whoever else may be interested or (2) query your peers for information at a moments notice.

Facebook is great when it (1) lets you catch up with old friends or (2) plan family/friend outings, or (3) share interesting information with friends and family.

The downside of Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs is that we get addicted to the stimulus and the feedback loop closes in until we're so desperate for more feedback we lose the self control to develop our ideas, our thoughts and our resources.

It's so easy to end up posting redundant or rehashed pet peeves.

It's much harder to do original thinking, especially when all the information you're consuming is the same information everyone else is consuming, which is quickly trending to regurgitations of things you all have already written and read.

The question of whether the technology empowers you, or whether it handicaps you applies beyond social networks as well.

Email, mobile phones, skype, all of it. Use it when it empowers you, when you are the one benefiting.

Drop any technology that's holding you back or sucking up your time.

Dropbox is a great example of technology that empowers you, it stays almost invisible and makes sure that any changes to any of your files are applied across all of your computers wherever they may be. You aren't by any of your computers? Oh, well then your files are also available to you on the web, or on your iPhone or wherever. Get the idea?

Blogger really allows me to focus my ideas and get them out of my head, making room for more ideas and allowing for others to comment and give me feedback on my existing ideas.

Facebook hasn't been particularly useful except to remember people I had long ago forgotten, but if I'd forgotten them, perhaps I didn't need to remember them? Occasionally, I have to admit, I can find an email address or phone number on facebook that I'm missing.. but that's the most helpful it is.

Buzz is next to useless -- turns out most of my email contacts waste as much if not more time than me sharing idiocy.

Twitter is great, but it's difficult for people to learn and takes time to make a case for why it's useful. (It's the epitome of the long tail phenomenon.) Personally, the investment of time is too great to accomplish anything that would truly empower me, which is why, even though I understand its benefits, I invest very little energy in twitter.

"Tablet" computers don't generally empower someone anymore than any other computers empower someone. The iPad is something different - it does what I want it to do faster than a more powerful computer will do the same thing -- that's what I mean by empowering.

"Smart" phones give us portable access to the internet, which can be empowering if we aren't just feeding our own feedback loop addiction. It only empowers if it makes your life easier or better. No question that smart phones pre-iPad were not empowering, with the exception of the BlackBerry.

The point here is don't waste time and energy on paranoia about privacy, addiction, or trends, the point is: Use the technology that empowers you, junk all the rest.

iPad as a good omen for users

There is a sea change coming, at least in some subset of the user-aware development community. As of now people are examining the computer and computer software finally through the lens of "how confusing is this to the user?"

I don't know if everyone remembers, but the personal computer was only the first step in an inexorable journey to the internet and more recently the social web.

Every one of the realizations that are currently hitting the hardware and software markets of personal computing will hit the internet and social network markets as well, in a year or two max.

Twitter is about as popular as it's going to get, it's way too user-unfriendly. Heck, even facebook is a pain to use.

We are going to see the rise of insanely intuitive social networks in the near future, and if nobody pays any attention to users and interfaces that are actually useful Apple will be one of the few (if not the sole) attendees of that party as well.

Future Internet Trends

I was interviewed for an article about cutting edge directions in the Internet industry. They asked specifically if I could suggest something that wasn't a hot topic yet, but might be in the near future.

That's a tough question to answer while at the same time being something fun to think about.

Basically I boiled it down to a question:

There is this realization dawning on the computing industry that computers really need to do much more to accomodate people than they have done until now. The iPad being the prime mover in this vicinity, at least currently.

The goal of the iPhone and iPad is to simplify the interface to the point that it is intuitive and is lost behind the raw functionality of the app, or of the net.

My question is, when will people wake up and standardize on a subset of interfaces for websites that also accomodate people?

We aren't there yet, in essence we're lightyears behind the progress that's been made on the client side with the advent of transparent net terminals like the iPad, iPhone and everything else aimed at competing with them.

[ps. I think the Flash trash-talkers are wrong and there's no reason to be so against a piece of software to the point of banning it from certain hardware, but in terms of contributing to the inconsistency of web interface, Flash allows for some of the worst offenders.]