The Future

Wonder if anyone from CS3216 is still reading these blogs...

Was reading a bunch of articles about the PC vs mobile space and started day-dreaming.

Actually, *this* article http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/12/in-bringing-office-to-ios-microsoft-is-playing-a-dangerous-game/. In it, the author mentions that Windows dominates the PC world, and iOS dominates the mobile world, and both aren't willing to let it go.

The development of their products is highly defensive right now I see it, with respect to the competitor's platforms. iTunes, Office for Mac, Office for iOS? How many of these are to provide true choice to the user - i.e. platform independence - and how many are to induce the user to switch platforms? Microsoft seems the less aggressive player in this tug-of-war, as compared to Apple which is consolidating its iOS base it seems.

That is just one thing.

I want to envision the future, where we probably have much more surfaces that are actually computers in some form. Let's look at some videos that probably better explain it...






This kind of world isn't just confined to Microsoft's dreams - the scenes in WALL-E (my favourite movie) also have significant similarity with such a future. (And Pixar is rather aligned with Apple as any Pixar fan should know). Various other sci-fi movies have also shown similar technology. These worlds are often shown to provide such power to the user, in a way that it is almost like a personal helper.

Assume we have all the technology to make all these happen. Transparent materials for the actual devices and interfaces, reliable APIs for virtual interactions in mid-air by any major platform.

In such a world, how would one dominant player or two/several competing players be different? What kind of ecosystem would we have? Cloud-based? Data freedom?
What would the platforms look like? Would there be apps? Apps would definitely specialize, how would apps communicate with each other?
What would devices look like? How are we going to make every surface smart? The advent of low cost computing has to come to make almost every surface do something.
What kind of infrastructure would we have? Fibre and wifi everywhere? Data centres won't be much different I presume... (www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/category/secret-servers-2/ good read too)

It's thus that I see Windows and maybe iOS as taking the right steps towards this future, though they are really slow steps - the packaging of apps, memory and resource management etc are really useful in this kind of future. Windows 8 share contracts are probably one of the things that when developed to its fullest, would enable apps to talk to each other, with whatever they want - critical for emergent behaviour and value to appear.

Windows Phone though, has become a niche computing platform. Would it one day just appear on one of these surfaces?

No one knows, but I sure hope this day comes in my lifetime...