A few of us recently discussed Nicolas Carr’s 2008 bestseller “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google”, and it struck us that while he very insightfully forecasted likely changes arising from the ongoing shift to utility computing infrastructures, he didn’t fully explore what we believe will be the consequences from this revolution to software product and user interaction design, and how software products may be consumed and used.
The shift we are talking about we typically refer to as part of the transition to “Web 3.0”, i.e. the client side of the ongoing revolution, including phenomena like mashups, composable apps, access anytime, anywhere, etc. Incidentally, we believe this transition will bring with it the disintermediation of proprietary OS’s through run-times like Google’s Chrome OS.
Cloud computing with its utility infrastructure and known SaaS applications like Google, Salesforce.com, and others like them are well explained paths technologically. Building his arguments on those trends, he continues to reflect more on what impact the infrastructural technology evolution we can already see will have on society (with a fair amount of conjecture at that; e.g. will it really result in a more polarized world?), than on the possibilities of this technological shift as a way of generating new types of products and new usage patterns.
The latter might actually be a topic of just as much significance, yet little is written about it. E.g. the notion of an “applet”, user-composable mashups, software platforms, and so on, lower the barrier of entry to software design and also redefine what an application is – from heavyweight apps like PowerPoint or Photoshop on now to, say, a mashups of a string of iPhone applets, are all “apps”.
The ease with which those new apps can be created, composed and customized for a small number of users’ purposes brings in a whole new dimension of “democtratized” software design. Think of it as being able to go to an automobile manufacturing floor and being able to compose your own custom car right there, and then drive it off the lot.
So, from a product design point of view we believe this emerging trend has just as profound an impact on how software is conceived and consumed, and thus how people will solve their everyday problems on their growing myriad of computing devices. A piece of software might serve a community of 10 users for 5 weeks, and then get discarded. That’s an app as much as Microsoft Excel or Intuit’s QuickBooks are apps. Who knows how that shift will impact expectations and perceptions of what other products in the physical world should become like?
For additional opinions and info about Nicolas Carr and his most recent book, please visit:
- Nicolas Carr’s blog: http://www.roughtype.com
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_G._Carr
- http://nyjoomla.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/the-big-switch-rewiring-the-world-from-edison-to-google-book-blog
- http://www.amazon.com/Big-Switch-Rewiring-Edison-Google/dp/0393333949/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260431648&sr=8-1
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