Productivity

Hopeful for the future: Tech finally trending to the non-technical.

A couple things popped up in the last few days which support our hypothesis that the real productivity benefit we will enjoy from new technology will only occur when tech becomes more intuitive to the average user who stands to benefit most from that technology. We are happy to present these events to track this overall theme of more usable technology.

The first example is the acquisition of Flip Video by Cisco. The news set off a post from crunchgear that asked if we were moving into an era of “dumb” tech (bad choice of words IMHO…”better designed” tech would have been more appropriate). The meme here is that tech is indeed becoming more efficient and more usable through better design (this is what made Flip attractive to Cisco and the millions that bought a Flip camera).

The next example is a higher order geek problem today, but it serves to show that we are getting closer to a world where my Mom could build and deploy her own cloud server. Although she probably doesn’t know what that means yet, if she knew that she was capable of  building something like this, it might trigger her to think about putting these tools to use and  build a solution to enhance her productivity with her clients. Dave Winer identified the potential of using the Amazon EC2 to buld a cloud based server in an hour. The key to the concept is that he published non-technical directions to put this technology into the hands of the masses who had previously thought this was unattainable without technical help. I hope this will help spur creative solutions at a time when creativity will be accelerated by contracting economic conditions.

The mass use of easy-to-consume technology (technology designed for mass consumption) will eventually help us get our economy back on track. Ideas will be executed, revenue generated, and jobs created because non-technical people will be empowered to create and use their creativity to solve problems.

Jobs and revenue have been created recently through simplification of technology: Look at the iPhone: a better smartphone and development tools lead to massive adoption of the platform and the application store. There are thousands of developers now earng a living creating applications. Millions carry the Flip them in their pockets and update and share videos in minutes (and create new online ad inventory of which they may share in profits).

Tough times often lead to great leaps of entrepreneurism and creative disruption. It looks like that maxim is holding true today.

© 2009 Life2(Beta).