Creeva’s World 2.0

In my RSS feed of Digg sto­ries I ran across this story of 8 bits of every­day tech we won’t use in a decade.   Some things are prob­a­bly cor­rect, oth­ers are so far off the mark that I don’t see it hap­pen­ing. Their items that I dis­agree with are as follows:

1.  Key­board and Mouse

2. Land­line

3. Opti­cal Discs

4. Oper­at­ing Systems

5.  Blog­ging

(To see what else the arti­cle had to say please read it)

Let’s go through the items I’m dis­grun­tled with one by one:

The key­board and mouse — the mouse I can under­stand, touch screen devices may replace the mouse actions for the nor­mal user.   Key­boards on the other hand will not go away.   You can not do data entry with just hand writ­ing recog­ni­tion as fast as you can with a qwerty entry device.  Now the key­board may go dig­i­tal into the touch screen device, but it will still be there — a key­board wait­ing for your input.   Before some­one states what about voice recog­ni­tion, there are quite a few peo­ple that can type much faster then they can talk.

Land­lines and the ana­log devices that love them will be around still.   They won’t be as preva­lent, but until the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion indus­try has the US com­pletely wired, ana­log modems will still exist.   They state they believe smart phones will even­tu­ally win out, my rebut­tal is there will always be dead zones.   Peo­ple actu­ally live in those dead zones and they will still need a com­mu­ni­ca­tion link that a land­line will sup­ply.   I should be argu­ing for them — I’ve kept a land­line in the­ory for the last 7 years and have made less then 1% of my calls on it.   I haven’t had an ana­log phone hooked up for the last two years.    Still when my in-laws can’t et any­thing other then dialup (no cell cov­er­age either) and my old band direc­tor still uses webTV — I don’t have high hopes for that to change for all Amer­i­cans in the next decade.  In this lump falls opti­cal discs.   Until broad­band is really every­where and con­tent can be down­loaded by all, opti­cal discs will still exist.

Oper­at­ing sys­tems are a tricky one to argue, but I don’t think every­thing will turn into a browser unless the browser becomes the OS and runs applets inside of it.   Browsers are ter­ri­ble for multi-tasking.  Yes you can run mul­ti­ple browser win­dows, but some things are quicker to run out­side of the browser — this is com­ing from some­one who believes in heavy web­i­fi­ca­tion of appli­ca­tions and in the dream of the cloud.  I can’t think we would take a huge step back­wards like this — this also leads to the argu­ment that the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion indus­try will have com­plete inter­net cov­er­age.   Until the Inter­net is ubiq­ui­tous there always will at least be Linux (which will prob­a­bly be the shim OS that runs the browser).

Finally blog­ging, I guess they should just pack their bags now and close the doors.   By their own pre­dic­tions they won’t even be around in ten years.    Yes real time web will become more impor­tant, yes more peo­ple will post short micro-blogs, but longer form writ­ing will never go away.   There will always be some his­tor­i­cal data you can search on that will be archived.   As long as this hap­pens there will be blog­ging of some fashion.

They are quite opti­mistic, and though they state that they dig deep into tech, it seems to just gloss over actual human hur­dles and dream for dreams sake.