Fraser Speirs’ iPad Future Shock

jpbrunelle:

“What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.”

Fraser Speirs - Future Shock

Wonderful perspective on the iPad and what will come from it. If you’re in tech, take 5 minutes to read this and then take a few deep breaths.

YES, this is a fantastic and thought-provoking post. The true brilliance of the iPad, and the eventual maturation of the ecosystem to support it, will forever revolutionize the way “users” interact with content. It truly ushers in a new way of positioning “high-technology.” It’s really the true democratization of the computing experience as a whole—no more fussy input devices, no more worrying about settings and frivolous compatibility requirements. It’s quite simply the right form factor for allowing the masses to consume content on their terms, in an immersive manner that until now, was only part of fan-fiction.

Yes, this type of device has been dreamt up before, but what everyone is failing to see is that it’s not revolutionary in a grand-sense of the term, but really in the details that allow it to be a truly usable device. That’s the one thing Apple has always done well, to truly rethink how we actually use a device—not how power users imagine a device should function. In the past nerds were truly empowered by the clumsy technology, which we not only embraced, but exploited to express ourselves in ways that only we truly understood. We were the gatekeepers of something deemed utterly useless by the myopic masses. The mass-adoption of the Internet and slow improvement of GUI’s over the years made the beige box in the corner of your basement more palatable to the masses, but there was still an air of exclusivity about it. Failed attempts at turning the humble PC into a true multimedia machine (see the Gateway 2000 Destination as a prime example) left manufacturers and users wavering in a sea of ever increasing processor speeds, but nothing to actually process. It was like driving around in a muscle car during the gas crisis of the ’70s.

Then came an actual focus on user experience, a term that really only became prevalent within the last decade. How did people interact with interfaces? What actually defines an interface or an experience? The fact is, we were trained to slavishly follow and interact with the current set input devices—QWERTY keyboards and mice were an invention of necessity. A stop-gap of sorts to truly allow users to actually reach out and “interact” with content inside the Tron universe that was the personal computer. No more. Computing needs to evolve to be lightweight, portable, and immersive. Content creators will always have the tools available to actually create, but we need to think of ways to allow more people to interact with, and find valuable, the things that we so tirelessly aim to create.

Stop hating, put aside your anti-Jobsian agendas and start looking into the future, not your own future but the future of people who all want to interact with tomorrow but never felt comfortable in doing so. The iPad may not catch on at first, but at the very least we have to hope that the sea-change ushered in by the mere thought of the device is enough to inspire a whole new generation of technologists—a group of individuals that aim to change the way we interact with the world, instead of merely clicking though it.

I’m excited.

Source: jpbrunelle