One wall of my office is covered with notes and diagrams trying to divine the future. Nobody can get it right, so I'm actually not worried about that. What's important is to generate views that are useful and helpful in planning. In that spirit, I thought I should share a few "predictions" and see what you all think. I'm thinking of the period 2015-2018. It's close enough to be real, but far enough to give the imagination some running room.
- Tablet-like experiences will achieve parity with computer-like experiences. I'm counting future "smartphones" as tablet-like, not just the note/slate size, and referring to usage on the network, not simply having one in your pocket or bag. Computers with keyboards are not going away, certainly not anytime in the near future, but designing for the tactile experience of tablets and touchscreens will be at least as important as any other form of information presentation design.
- Voice interfaces -- recognition and synthesis -- won't dominate but they will become a serious part of the mainstream. Piping that data through realtime translators will begin to make the Star Trek Universal Translator real. And it'll keep the gang down at the NSA amused.
- Computer chips won't get much faster in clock speed. Instead, the multicore processors that emerged over the last decade will sprout more cores, shrink in size and power consumption, and push their way from the desktop down into tiny devices.
- Networking costs will drop and mobile usage will soar. If you thought we had an information surplus and a lack of scarcity in 2010, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Everything really will be everywhere. McLuhan would recognize the network as an extension of the mind. Old fogeys will continue to complain about a loss of quality, how the world has gone to hell, and how you kids should get off the lawn.
- Apple, Google and Amazon will be big winners. Microsoft, Yahoo and any company that behaves like a newspaper will be big losers.
- Your media experience won't be tied to a device -- it'll be tied to your identity. Current state will live in the cloud and you won't know or care where the data is stored. Quit reading or listening on one device, switch to another, and pick up where you left off. Your pocket screen, tablet, 28-inch desktop display and 55-inch wall "television" are all portals into a single experience.
- Radio, television and print won't go away, but they'll be pushed to the margins. Real-time "channels" will still exist and be significant as discovery venues, but they'll be in the minority in terms of usage.
- All your devices will be location-aware. All your devices will recognize and network with each other without configuration hassles. All your experiences will become personalizable based on your preferences, your behaviors, your location and your current activities.
- Having lost their role as discovery media, any print or print-like "newspapers" that survive will have adapted to focus on other roles, such as explanation, briefing, and entertainment.
- "News" will no longer be a good label for the work done by any surviving "newsrooms," as networked word-of-mouth will have stolen nearly all of the "breaking news" function from professional journalism. Smart "editors" will focus on understanding, which they will support through facilitating and providing context, analysis, explanation and debate, and perhaps re-embrace civic action.
Comments
Hey, I kinda like No. 10
Tablet parity
Usage
I'm referring to the amount of usage (especially online, interactive usage) these things get. That's what's important to me as a provider of interactive services and content. What devices will people be using to consume, create content and interact? What does that suggest about the kinds of content and experiences I need to create? And the design?
Right now there's a lot of overblown hype about the iPad among people who largely were already Apple fans, have high disposable income with no barriers to obtaining a redundant interface, and feed their egos by being able to flash the latest and most fashionable toys. That's harsh, but let's face it: the numbers are very, very, very tiny. Tablets are all potential, and as I keep reminding people, we're only about 90 days into this journey and it's foolish to make wild projections based on early adopters.
What's important is the next several layers of consumers -- the mainstream. I'm guessing that it will take five to eight years for tablets to account for about half of total usage, and that people with workplace needs to create and manipulate text won't prefer them. Could be more, could be less -- but it seems certain that we'll need to understand and take advantages of the differences in interaction implied by tablets while continuing to support keyboard-mouse-monitor interactions.
Future for students?
Interesting points
Close enough to be real
already
"Get off the damn lawn"
Further out
Apps
I want to single out and amplify Brian's observation, because it's an important one that seems to whoosh right over the heads of most mass media people in their eagerness to see tablets as electronic print:
In the 16 years I've been working in online news, I've seen our products change from clean, minimalist rivers of information (because that's all the tech supported) into bloated nightmares of corner peel, window shade, popup, popunder, autoplaying video, sticky note and animated-layer advertising. The payload has become 5 percent information and 95 percent scripting and graphics. You can barely get some news sites to render with anything less than a 2-gigahertz CPU, a gigabyte of memory and a megabit data pipe.
So now we have apps, and Brian's observation that the most popular and useful apps are the ones that simplify. What will we do with that? I'm afraid I'm not very optimistic.
Simplification
Radio, Television & Print