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This Is Gonna Be BigOctober 2nd, 2005 by Hans Bjordahl :: see related comic |
After spending some time in this forum soliciting gripes about the worst technology experience ever, I thought I’d flip around and focus on experiences that get us enthused about technology in the first place.
What brought this to mind? This past weekend I was in the Apple store, and it was a zoo. Apparently, the newer, smaller, sexier iPod — the “Nano” — was just being released and the store was in the throes of what all retailers dream of: a true consumer frenzy. The buzz was palpable. The line at the register must have been 20 people deep. I heard someone say “only four left!” but everyone seemed to be happy to just get on the waiting list. People tired of crowding around the Nanos were spilling out and actively inspecting the rest of the Apple products in the store — just like Apple diagrammed it. : )
Wow.
The iPod/Nano phenomenon seems to be just one in a surge of technology products and experiences that are capturing people’s imagination these days. Flickr comes to mind — I spent some time this weekend surfing someone’s vacation photos from Budapest, just because I could. So does Tivo, which I believe became a verb even faster than Google did. Between people’s blogs and their fantasy football sites, nearly everyone seems to have a reason these days to visit their favorite Web page and hit “reload” obsessively. RSS promises to eliminate the “reload” altogether and automagically bring the new content to you.
What new and exciting technology out there gets you excited? What new technology products or experiences do you look at and say to yourself, “Wow. This is gonna be big”?
Maybe I’m just buying into the hype, but Vista seems like it’s going to big.
The next big thing on the web is going to be the company who combines everything I do into one nice easy to use portal, that’s not totally covered in ads.
I’m going to give away a billion dollar Idea here to google or MSN or any other exec reading but here goes:
1 site, 1 login to acces my blog, photos, rss reader, search, personalized start page, email etc..
people have tried, but nobody’s done a good job at integrating all of the web’s killer apps. The company who can do that successfully will be the one outlasting all the others.
@ HockeyGod: Y’know, I think we’re slowly starting to see that happen with Google…
They already have blogger, picasa, gmail, and of course the basic google, and google.com/ig and stuff… And since they already have google accounts which are networked, that might not be too far away.
HockeyGod a super cool website that offers everything you (or anyone else) might want is not exactly cheap. Whether you are willing to pay for it and if not enjoy all that advertising. Yeeesh.
I think Google is the best bet in that direction. Yahoo! is a candidate too. I would discount Microsoft because they would try to be too Windows or MSN centric.
Check this out:
http://atanveer.blogspot.com/2005/10/evolving-internet-and-changing-rules.html
I have posted two links to articles that talk about this very topic.
Bug Bash is a comic strip written and illustrated by Hans Bjordahl. Bug Bash is a comic strip about technology: managing technology, the business of technology. It's about project management and managing projects through the dull world of Rational Rose, use cases, and requirements. Functional requirements, user requirement, functional specifications, design specifications, call it what you want but it's still the bane of project managers. And when you're done with that, you can think about all the fun that comes with timelines, scheduling, estimates (PERT estimation anyone?) and resourcing until Gantt charts are coming out of your ears. Let's not forget the risk management in the software engineering life cycle. Maintaining the project is just as much fun, managing what was initially set out in requirements and trying to keep feature creep / scope creep in check with change management. If any of these words send nightmares to you, the project manager, then this site probably rings true with you. (Who Links Here?)