microtrends

Microtrends

I do enjoy the microtrends column that appears in the Times on Saturday, I have also just bought Microtrends by Mark J Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne, which seems to be unrelated. Not only that, there is an article of microtrends predictions in yesterday's Times Magazine.

However not to be deterred, I would like to add my own tuppence worth.

I think that the advent of most people having decent - always on - broadband is creating a huge change in the way that the world works. I would hesitate to make any radical predictions, but these days, simply managing to discern what is actually happening out there at the moment requires a lot of insight.

Software can now do its own updating, virtually on the fly, checking for updates, and asking for permission to download them. These can be huge files. There is minimal distribution cost attached. So software can shift as a beta, and update to alpha without any huge downside.

Obviously we can all browse and download music, and all the physical record shops are on the way out. Other media are easily digitised, perhaps books less so than some others.

Broadcast media can now be downloaded or stored, and you can timeshift to avoid tiresome adverts. I would not want to be in the TV business trying to fund broadcasting through an ever shrinking part of the advertising cake.

Always on - also means that cloudware, having your applications on some remote server, makes sense, more sense than running them off your hard drive.

Similarly off site storage is possible, why back up to a hard drive, when you can put all your photos on Flickr, back up your calendar, and contacts to .mac.

We will increasingly be able to, and take for granted the ability to transfer and download vast amounts of data, and one effect of this will be that we become less aware of whether we are uploading or downloading, just as we are unaware how our computer is working, we will become unaware of where applications are, where bytes are stored, what processes are behind our interaction with IT.

There is increased scope for dumb terminals, these need not be computers, a mobile phone as dumb terminal, point of sale gadgets as dumb terminal. Things that we barely think of as IT as dumb terminals, information at bus stops, smart washing machines that will opportunistically use electricity when it is cheapest, fridges that advertise products based on your previous purchases and offer on line ordering.

As in the Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come...