Old World vs. New World

 

Back in 2006, as I started to realize how consumer oriented innovation was leading enterprise innovation and could serve as a proxy for future enterprise applications, I started a habit of replacing the word "computing" with the word "communications" when reading new announcements and visions of the future for computing.

You know... "cloud-computing" became "cloud-communications"..."virtual computing" became "virtual communications"... "social computing" became "social communications"... you get the picture.

Where am I going with this?

I found myself repeating this habit when reading Steve Frank describe an interesting way to think about the difference between "Old World Computing" and "New World Computing" when reacting to the recent Apple iPad launch: 

"The bet is roughly that the future of computing:

1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps"

So, take out the word "computing" and replace it with "communications" and we have a rough draft vision statement for the future of communication applications... driven by the emerging computing model.

"The bet is roughly that the future of communications:

1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps

For me, this New World vision for (consumer + enterprise) communications implies a number of important user experience, user interaction, device and web application design choices for new products that need to be considered and tested with users.

Do you agree with this view for new world communication applications?