Twenty years later...

The subject of what I'm writing today is by way of an interesting image that Miguel Cocjin (our chief consumer tech evangelist) stumbled upon during his everyday research. This guy though refuses to work and only wallows away in nothingness. An officially dispensable personality who'd be an excellent re-definition of the word bum. And as I take back the preceding two sentences given the fact that they are false and misleading, Miguel, on the contrary, is a spectacular character in Singularity. If you happen to know him, you would agree that he is neither a bum nor is he unproductive. The last person in the world who could possibly be either.

See, those words didn't align at all to the subject matter. Fine. Here's the image.

Thinking about it, all of the technologies you would find above leads to one staggering thought: none of these items have yet to find a true replacement. Well Herald, there is that huge leap from analog to digital. There's also the Internet if you forgot. (...) Okay, okay. Ignore the preceding statement, would you? Let me try to prove my point again.

We can make the claim that a gazillion more transistors can be jammed into a processor every few years since Moore's Law became tech industry canon. We can state that the level of innovation in consumer tech manufacturing has led to major industry revolutions such as the iPod and iPhone. As you gaze on that image, again, what really happened all along is amalgamation. Repeat. What really happened all along is amalgamation. Last. What really happened all along is amalgamation.

Good. Now that you agree with me, allow me to delve deeper. (Promise, I'll be more serious too.)

Amalgamation is where things come together. No doubt, the smartphone in your pocket can perform all of these activities at far better performance and fidelity while running other things--simultaneously. But I believe that the engineering behind every ambitious creation owes more of its success to the genius poured into the form factor than the brains that power them. Technology is technology. And what we've learned from tech pioneers like Kodak, Xerox, Sony, Atari, and Apple is that fidelity, compactness, user experience, and, most importantly, user-centric design, have become the undisputed governing laws of what we end up liking and loving.

Whatever comes next will therefore be a continuous evolution of the previous generations' ideas. The tech race is now more important than ever because of this. Now that every tech manufacturer understands what Steve Jobs was pushing across for many decades, everyone will have their chance. And while it's true that most of the basic technologies that have existed long ago are merely being re-formulated with it, the point has always been about the end product and how it will surprise, excite and inspire.

What is it that we will want tomorrow?

"I don't know what that next big thing might be, but I have a few ideas." -Steve