What Will Be the Next to Die
August 18, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
An interested question was presented to an audience I was in this past weekend. If you could predict what the technology landscape will look like in five years, what players won’t be here? If you could go back five years and have guessed, would you have been right today?
In my lifetime the things that come to the top of my mind of having died would be the following:
- vinyl records
- cassettes
- 8-tracks
- beta max
- VCR
- floppy disks
If I were to guess about some other items that won’t be here in five years I’d add landline phones. I think incandescent bulbs will probably go away along with places like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
The challenge these days with all of these changes is the persistence of the market that’s available through Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. These days I can’t really imagine anything completely dying, but easily getting out of general availability and usage.
With regards to online use. Will email be around? Or will it be replaced with services like Google Wave? Will services like Facebook still be around, or will the next bigger, better deal replace it? I know I sure hope MySpace goes away for good. Will we at some point decide that twitter’s 140 characters is just too much to take in and we’ll drop to some service that allows us to update everyone with one word poetry?
For the next 5 years? Hmm.
Well I think music CD’s might go away, if the record companies truly improve their pricing structure and audio quality on digital music stores. The prevalence of computers and cellphones with Internet access makes it more convenient for music listeners that way.
E-Mail will still be around. Why? Because e-mails are the best way to express full thoughts in a format that someone can easily keep and store. Posting the thought on Twitter would not give enough details, a Facebook or any social network update again has some limit, and IMs often lack a way to keep the information, and it is hard to sort out the important details in the info.
Twitter isn’t going away, and “one word poetry” is too ridiculous. I don’t know about Google Wave, but I think Facebook will be here for a long time, and will adapt quickly when users want something new.