IBM: The 'next big thing' no longer exists

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And people continue to follow the herd...

Virtually everybody on this message board is chiming in: "It's not true! There's still room for innovation!" Isn't this guy from IBM therefore being innovative in not going with the crowd?

That's a bit of a silly, rhetorical question, but seriously: Name a technology that's likely to come out in the next 10 years and also likely to reshape how we think about tech. There isn't one.

There has not been ANY technology change to come out in the last 30 years that has been more innovative than the simple invention of the personal computer. Not even the Internet or the WWW is as important as the simple capability of having a programmable box with processing power on your desk at home. The PC came out in the 1970s, and there hasn't been anything to beat it since then. The PC, in turn, spawned a lot of creative ideas, but only a few of them were truly innovative or useful. Yeah, people were wrong when they said nobody would want a computer, but now everybody has a computer. Computers are no longer novel or innovative, okay?

Take a good, objective look at the slop that people are mislabeling as "innovation" today and you'll see a kernel of truth in what the man says. A simple example: What was the big feature that drove adoption of Firefox? Tabbed browsing. Holy smokes, how hard is it to implement TABBED WINDOWS in an application? When people are so desperate for "innovation" that tabbed windows in a browser are received like the Second Coming, you know that people are really and truly stuck for a good idea. Similarly, Microsoft pushes a new version of Media Player and actually convinces people that they should pay $200 to upgrade to the next version of Windows for it.

Look at history before the 1900s. How much innovation was there? Sure, there's always been the odd invention here and there, but humankind doesn't operate on innovation; it operates on manual labor. The PC was the big invention of the late 1900s, and people still want to believe that we live in an era where brilliant new inventions come down the pipe every few weeks. Sorry, folks, it ain't so. There may be a new Big Thing coming, but it might not arrive for another 30 years.

Posted by: LateBlt   Posted on: 03/15/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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