Ren points out an interview with a major cell-phone inventor:
> http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/jun01/qa.asp
I like this guy. His main points are that mobile information processing
innovations should, ideally, be:
- unobtrusively portable
- continuously available
- limited in purpose
- an improvement on something you can get already
- open to connections (standards-compliant)
- open to competition in the market, so that innovations flow
HOWEVER (as he points out) even with these advantages, you still
have to wait for change. Real change starts with young people, not
with glacial, status-quo-shackled international standards committees.
Young people have to go through diapers, pre-school, and
grade school, and only then can they start (re-)defining "cool"
or even just "normal."
This takes time, too, and sometimes leads to regression instead,
but at least it works. That's more than you can say for OSI
protocol standardization, which seems to have gone from
infancy-diapers to senility-diapers with no intervening social
benefit - no doubt, a product of far too much adult supervision.
I wear two other computational devices on a regular basis, besides
my cell phone. Both of them neatly illustrate the above points.
One of them wraps around my wrist. All it does is compute time.
Sure, you can get models with calculators in them. And notepads.
There's even one that runs Linux. These "innovations" don't fly
in the marketplace, though. Chronometry turns out to be enough
for one wrist.
While obvious to us now, civilization took its time getting
comfortable with the idea of accurate time-of-day measures.
It has taken even longer to agree on standards. (Japan
keeps toying with the idea of daylight savings time, but never
seems to get around to it. So I have close the drapes at
4AM, now, dammit.)
Even after the clock became popular, technology had a ways
to go to before time computation became a practical mobile app.
And I'm sure that the first pocket-watch owners were thought
rather odd for some years, as is true of any of us whose pockets
unaccountably bulge. The first forays onto the wrist must have
excited some initial ridicule.
The other mobile device that I routinely wear will require
more explanation.
First: I wear it on my head. Actually, on my face, if you can
believe that.
It's a special-purpose custom analog optical computer in the
(now de facto standard) head-mounted dual-processor
configuration. It projects stereoptically-aligned output directly
through my corneas and onto my retinas! No, this doesn't hurt.
(Well, some mornings....)
God, I felt like such a geek when I put my first one on, years ago.
The low-end models that my cheapskate parents bought
me were uncomfortably heavy, their design a social liability.
So I usually didn't bother. In fact, I usually lost each headset
within weeks, infuriating the parental units.
But there are lighter headsets on the market - mostly silicon,
less metal, less plastic; more expensive, but cooler-looking.
So it's OK, now. Besides, I need this technology in a way
that I didn't before.
The best thing: 99%+ compliance with reality, as it is transmitted locally,
in real time, through the visible spectrum, by The Artist Formerly
Known As God. Free content! (There's a rumor that he's going to
a pay-per-view business model soon, but I don't believe it. His
only direct competitor has been trying that for millennia, and is still
relegated to purveying only in certain niche markets.)
Talk about your killer app. And such quality of service.
I never get protection faults, network delays, virus attacks, or
unrecoverable system crashes. (Well, OK, I've had unrecoverable
system crashes, but they were my fault.)
I don't worry about protocol or file-format revisions coming along
and rendering my current unit obsolete. The Artist's photonic
packet-exchange systems have been stable since the first
three seconds of the Current Release.
Headsets readily accept and reformat input from all major-brand
computer monitors I've tested them on. You wouldn't believe
the hassle this saves.
It's always on. It doesn't even need batteries. At least, I can't
figure out where I'd install fresh ones, if it came to that.
Best of all, I've never once had to do modem configuration, a task
on which I can procrastinate for weeks..
(True, I get a lot of spam, but I think this is mostly from The Direct
Competitor.)
It doesn't tell me a lot more about the world that I couldn't find
out anyway, but it helps a lot. Some people aren't so lucky - they
NEED a set. For them it's not an information appliance, but an
actual visual-system prosthesis. (How troubling that I'm inexorably
becoming one of these people - a handy fact when I'm running
out of reasons to feel sorry for myself, perhaps, but not much
of a selling point otherwise.)
When a piece falls off, I can go into any number of competing
stores for repairs. These repairs are usually offered free, in the
hopes that *their* store will be chosen when I decide to customize
my next headset. Occasionally, when I ask for the same chassis
design, I'm told "Sorry - the vendor no longer supports that
configuration." So I can't always get what I want. But I can always
get what I need.
I figured this was such a category-killer in the mobile device space,
it must spawned dozens of IPOs and multinational corporate empires,
overnight.
Then I read some history.
Curiously, despite maximum shipping delays of only a few months
when this device first became practical, it took about 15 years for
it to spread throughout Europe and into the Near East. I thought
maybe this was because they didn't do enough build-out of the
support infrastructure in advance of product roll-out. That can
take a lot of investment. You know, the old new-medium bootstrap
problem? Or maybe it was some regulatory hassle?
Really, though, the problem was that, despite their huge advantages,
these devices were just too weird for people at first. Not to
mention being pretty expensive.
Sure, you had your "early adopters". They might actually have
delayed the mainstream acceptance of the product, though -
strutting ostentatiously down the street wearing these things,
using them on any input data they could find, noisily acting
all superior about their new headsets in your favorite cafes,
while you're squinting at the news, trying to concentrate.
Don't you just hate early adopters? I know I do.
The backlash was, in retrospect, predictable.
You can still find translations of "four-eyes" in the argot
of sadistic children in all major languages.
And for adults, there is a faint but indelible semiotic resonance
(its plicate convolutions not quite yet deconstructed) between
these devices and those weaselly big-word know-it-alls. You
must know at least one. "Four-eyes, four-eyes!" you want
to chant. Even if you ARE one.
And - speaking of me - I'm still a little self-conscious. Not
without reason. Why, I was out on a date once, and....Oh,
well, let's just say I made a bit of spectacle of myself. What a
moment to lose a lens! This technology isn't perfect yet.
Yes, I could wear those miniaturized units that you actually
implant (sort of), one in each eye. I tried it though, and I didn't
like it. It just made me feel like some kind of....cyborg.. And all
those cleaning supplies!
Younger people, who grew up with this newer technology, they
think nothing of it. These days, they even buy disposables.
That just seems wasteful, to me. You know, when I was a kid.....
I used to be such a techno-vanguard type. Funny how
that works.
-m
leap@gol.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Renfield Kuroda" <Renfield.Kuroda@morganstanley.com>
To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 9:01 PM
Subject: (keitai-l) Everyone is wrong
> http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/jun01/qa.asp
> --
> ascii: r e n f i e l d
> octal: \162 \145 \156 \146 \151 \145 \154 \144
> hex: \x72 \x65 \x6e \x66 \x69 \x65 \x6c \x64
>
> e-business technologies | engineering and strategy
>
> "Connecting people, ideas and capital,
> we will be the world's first choice
> for achieving financial aspirations"
>
> -- Binary/unsupported file stripped by Listar --
> -- Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
> -- File: smime.p7s
> -- Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
>
>
>
> [ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
>
>
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Wed May 30 16:55:39 2001