Our electronic futures are forming

There are many global issues, be them hunger or terrorism or privacy. I wont attempt to explain why how we work will effect thing apparently unrelated, but they do. The old butterfly flapping it’s wings is true today. A seemingly simple change in the way we work might free up cash to be spent on a charity or a purchase to bolster the economy. Most changes are offerings from those we trust and we hope they have really thought everything through when it comes to exposing our personal information. Some large corporations release things they hope you will buy so they make their numbers this year… others release items as a stepping stones to an end game many years in the future.

Today is the 9th anniversary of the introduction of the iPod where it was promised we would have over 1000 songs in our pocket. It started as a little device that felt right in your hand and was easy to use. There was many other options on the market but they stopped being supported or went other directions. The iPod grew in features to be a storage device, then a movie player and now a connected game machine. It could stand on it’s own but wasn’t expected to as a accessory industry grew around it and the manufacture updated other hardware and software solutions around it. Those being desktop software that managed your music, photo and movie libraries as well as expanding on the hardware to be a smartphone and another to be a larger tablet like device.

Looking back at the mid 80’s, we had keyboards and monitors that were basically just an external monitor to one 286 computer that many people shared. It was fine with everyone running the same program. When we got our own desktops we were running many different programs amongst us without the need of each other. Online services have grown, but we are not truly going back to a dumb keyboard/monitor world.

The services being offered online are getting close if not passing the desktop ‘office’ software solutions. But, does anyone want to do all of their work online? If you at the office and always connected, would you notice a difference between if the software was on your machine or not? Looking at what is being used in the current Word and Photoshop by the masses most often, it is a very small set of features. Would it be acceptable to have very lite versions of software locally installed for general day-to-day work and then use a more robust tool online? The online software would become a service that could be charged monthly or per use.

Continue reading Our electronic futures are forming