|
The future is coming into focus.
1. The web + Office + all content of every sort (including games, print media, audio book…) for $50-$100 per month, accessible instantly everywhere all the time by almost everyone.
2. If it’s worth focusing on, by definition that focus excludes other potential objects of focus, this enables vast economies of scale.
3. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple will interface directly with consumers. Publishers, News companies and Advertising companies will lose there access to the consumer. Companies like Microsoft will provide the the platform but the end user is the context.
4. The same cloud that the artists or creative person uses in their day to day life will be the same cloud they publish too. Most content will become
user generated content. Those entities that drove up the prices without
contributing to quality or creativity will be driven out. These can be recognized as the ones that were constantly spreading paranoia about piracy or now trying to spread paranoia about security. These were the ones trying to make margins by complaining about the cost of high definition art. These are the ones trying to tell retail and plastic disk purveyors to resist.
5. Under the flat fee subscription model, content will be paid for in seconds of consumer focus. This and the increasing power of search and indexing ensure that ads will not compete effectively for those seconds attention and will be pushed out. The same goes for news, all content of every type will compete for each second of attention. Traditional TV will die out, it will not be competitive against more engrossing and interactive forms of media that are coming. Cable companies will only survive if they take on a dumb pipe stance.
6. Content providers will try to consolidate their offerings to capture seconds that would associate with their offerings. In this process content will become richer and more interactive. The old distinctions between content types will blur and at some point be forgotten.
7. News papers are going out of business. That is partly a function of the better access to information and community that web has been providing but also it’s a function of people realizing that focusing on the news isn’t good for them. A huge part of Google’s has been ad and propaganda free clean interface.
8. The small screen is going to rise. Its seems 3 form factors are going to be coming to the fore. Call them CloudNode (iPhone,) CloudBook, (NetBook,) and cloud screen (large screen- really a monitor HDTV isn’t going to survive as a medium.) The key is the high definition iPhone (see the new HiDef Zunes.) What is special is that these combine a high resolution experience with broadband and control. They have the practical and instant ability to control other systems and environments. That might be waving an iPhone at a screen to play a flight sim that is driven by the iPhone or the cloud. But more impressively its probably like Tom Tom’s system in Europe. There a literal cloud of 17 million iPhones (or compatible devices) anonymously feed positional data to a traffic computer that combines all their speeds on roads with eyewitness feedback and data base histories for each section of road so that each iPhone or Tom Tom can rout around traffic on the fly to produce the shortest rout and keep the driver appraised of an accurate arrival time. That’s the cloud in action, it borg like, its approaching the coordination of a bee hive. Its already with us at 60-80mph influencing in real time the decisions that keep our families safe and save us time.
9. Is the cloud optional, can it be forestalled? No it can’t. Take the Tom Tom option. Would it be ok for major centers with zone in antiquity to come to a halt with Bangkok style traffic? Would any amount of zoning or light coordination help the problem? No. Would physical infrastructure help? Yes but it would take too long. This is spontaneous order. When the student is ready… well the cloud is appearing and the problem that required it couldn’t wait any longer, it is literally being driven by necessity.
10. There is going to be a lot of whining from those who were used to being able to filter what people could look at and influence what they could express, or take time and money at will. My personal opinion: With regard to this, they don’t have any ‘rights’ they were paid off a long time ago and are suffering for predictably not seeing the writing on the wall. They were only interested in a status quo that wasn’t working for most people and are victims of drinking their own cool aid.
12. Here is an example of what will displace advertising: Wow that’s a cool new iPhone. Yeah Apple sent it to me free. Cool, I am using my iPhone to order a new one now. In this example the end user got the product for free to keep, if they liked it they would use it and the word would spread, if not they wouldn’t and the word wouldn’t spread. In this example the new iPhone comes with some pretty great introductory support so that the new user has a painless snap in process. This is for the better, a lot of that talent that used to get wasted on the barrel scraping ad industry will not go to leverage computer enhanced education through you guessed it- the cloud and systems like the iPhone.
11. This will be the 2nd coming of Microsoft. If the PC/Web was an acorn the Cloud is an Oak tree. On the other hand there is a particular large electronics company that specializes in screens. Its screen business may survive by I see it being forced to divest everything else. There is a console maker that makes nothing but consoles, If it survives, it will likely be in name only and on the basis of an ancient piece of IP.
12. Here is an example of what will displace advertising: Wow that’s a cool new iPhone. Yeah Apple sent it to me free. Cool, I am using my iPhone to order a new one now. In this example the end user got the product for free to keep, if they liked it they would use it and the word would spread, if not they wouldn’t and the word wouldn’t spread. In this example the new iPhone comes with some pretty great introductory support so that the new user has a painless snap in process. This is for the better, a lot of that talent that used to get wasted on the barrel scraping ad industry will not go to leverage computer enhanced education through you guessed it- the cloud and systems like the iPhone.
13. Again this is unstoppable. One can’t argue with vision. No amount of whining, complaining, or paying people to misrep or fabricate will slow this down. Take the bandwidth nonsense. The same people have been betting against the internet for decades and losing, they’ve been nay saying it all the way to bankruptcy. Between the start of last year and the end of this year private industry and the US government will have spent close to 200 Billion in hard cash (that’s not speculative credit swaps) on hard infrastructure. They’ve been wanting to spend that much on highways forever and never been able to spend it. But here they can see this is as big as the railroad and the highway combined, this is the cloud. This is what brings us back to our local communities and rebuilds citizenship. This is opportunity knocking and yesterdays losers can go on all they want about capping opportunity but that’s not the compelling vision they need to provide an effective counter. There is no effective counter. Let the shorting being!
|
