Guys like you were the ones back in the 50's making those film strips about the future and how we'd all have plexiglass bubble domed rocket cars, and nuclear powered toothbrushes, etc. Gee, it didn't happen then and it won't now. We can all dream of this utopia world where all the icky stuff gets done by machine instead of the uneducated, and we all spend all our time creating better and better technology, or art, music etc., but unfortunatly basic human nature keeps us from this great Star Trek future. We basically like to conquer and fight each other over religions, skin pigmentation, wealth etc. It's far more likely that the great technically educated men of tommorrow will use, or be payed to use, their minds to invent some new death ray, and then an anti death ray, or some new nerve toxin, and then a genetically altered human that's immune to the toxin, rather than technology designed to ease the burden of the entire human race. The reasons for this are simple, profit and wealth preservation. The poor usually only want to become rich, and the rich and powerful want to stay rich and powerful either by making more money or destroying what others have, no one wants everything to be nice and equal.
Ex-Dilbert said it very well "Technology is great at making ZERO money and obsoleting your current product." Man I wish i could find the post I read recently about how all this great technology boon has really done little to overall productivity, just moved things from one area to another. It all balances out. You have to dumb the technology down to where you have enough of an audience to make it profitable, you have to pay good wages to attract good people, but pay too much and then everyone goes into that field and the supply catches up. Man I could just go on and on with you, but you won't get it. Tons of money has been completely burned away in the latest technology investment bubble. That bubble is still deflating, no it's not over yet, not by a longshot. That bubble sucked up a lot of money that in saner times would have been invested elsewhere, energy is a glaringly obvious one. Now those areas have fallen behind and will need to be brought back up, and to do so money will need to flow into them, which it will at the expense of technology spending. There's also the double whammy that because so much money was spent on tech., there's HUUUGE overcapacities, that in this drastically slowed growth environment, will take a long long time to absorb. Then there's also the fact that tech has hit a demand wall on practically all fronts. PC's(which drove the whole cycle), no demand for better speed. Sure some academics will want a 28GHZ Pentium 7 so they can solve 700 million simultaneous diff. eq's to tell us what a banana tastes like, but Joe 6 pac, is very happy with his 500mhz machine. He can do email, keep the checkbook balanced, and look at nekkid women, that's all the multiprocessing his life needs. And to download those nekkid women he has a cable modem or DSL(please spare me the low market penetration stats on these), and even on 56k life's not all bad. Won't be any real broadband to the doorstep anytime soon. Wireless. Fuggetaboutit. J6P don't want to pay up to do anymore than he is now, in fact he wants to pay a lot less for wireless. Most folks don't want to be on the internet 24hr's a day wherever they are. There's no real need among the populous for 3g at this time. Internet. Been there and done that, nothing really new and cool in some time now. In fact I think a lot of net users that have been around, are actually liking sites that go back a year or two, simpler less cluttered, more functional. Bells and whistles grow boring. We have went too far too fast in tech, and it's going to take a long while to consolidate these gains, and then one day some dude will come up with some quantum leap in coolness that will set everything on fire again. Could be tommorrow, but odds are it's years away.
BTW, this wired home thing is crap. The really usefull part is out there now for anyone that wants it. Get a Phillips Pronto remote, program it on the computer to control everything imaginable. It, along with a PC with a good audio card, video card, video capture card, DVD player, and wireless keyboard and mouse($1,000-1,500 tops), can interface with anything you'd want. Buy a 802.11 wireless access point and some receiver cards and you have wireless internet wherever you want in the house. Stereo, TV, alarm system, lighting, etc. etc., it can be done right now, convergence is here right now. All that's left is to dumb it down where enough cretins can be found to buy it and make it profitable. Again, people don't give a rats ass about a smart fridge that tells the grocery store when you're running low on Pillsbury cookie dough and Heinekins, that's just stupid. Bluetooth is stupid and slow, and too limited in range. The good stuff works right now, but not enough people care. They're more than happy with what they have, and will be for a long while.
Finally AAPL. What a POS. Yeah, let's buy into the Betamax of computers. But, they have great innovations. Yeah, like colors, and titanium notebook cases, etc. What a bunch of crap. It's a shame in a way, AAPL is great at dumbing down tech and making it more usable, but they are now, and always have been just too expensive for what they are. It's too often with them, bells and whistles and not real innovation, or when they do innovate(Firewire instead of crapulent USB) it's too early and when whatever they come up with takes off it's others that really make money from it. I guess the thinking is AAPL went in the toilet first so it will come out first. To me, it went in first because it charged too much for too little and when PC growth started slowing no one wanted their crap. This means when growth picks back up, there's will not be the first, but the last to get going again. People have to have too much money to spend to buy AAPL. When times are tough and getting tougher, people will buy the $500 PC and suffer with Windows 98se, rather than pay $1,500 for a Mac. Only the diehard anti Wintel crowd will keep it alive in the next few years, because they will not have enough new innovations at affordable prices to grow, or even stay the same size. You mr. technologist have been warned. |
