Upon 2020

From his responses to a survey at Harvard. Interesting read.

I was thinking the other day how Apple now has a contiguous line of screen sizes from 30 inches down to just a couple of inches (Desktop Mac, MacBook, iPad, iPhone, iPod nano). They don’t do TVs, so there is still room at the large end. But they have all other sizes covered.

So if I were Apple, and there aren’t any screen size holes to fill any more, what new device would I come up with?

I can think of only one, and that may turn out to be the most important of all: smart glasses. Heads-up goggles that is, using the same form factor that has worked well for glasses for centuries.

My understanding is that in 2010, nobody has technology that could do that. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the following chain of events occurred through 2020:

1. 3-D movies like Avatar are a huge hit, so mass production of 3-D screens commences (already happening).
2. Computer desktop monitors go 3-D and the main Mac Finder / Windows Explorer user experience becomes 3-dimensional. (In the past month, the first 3-D monitors have gone on sale at Fry’s, at a rather reasonable price. I think this one is unstoppable.)
3. People get used to wearing glasses to look at monitors (they are needed for the 3-D effect), and the monitor manufacturers are bundling them with their monitors.
4. Then they might as well incorporate Bluetooth audio in the 3-D glasses. They sit on one’s ears already anyway, and it helps with watching TV in a room with other people.
5. Now the stage is set to make the glasses smarter: first, only a few pixels might be projected into the glasses. Perhaps the volume control indicator for the audio, or an alert.
6. They will also start to connect to one’s cell phone, so one can use the Bluetooth audio already on one’s head to take an incoming call. And before we know it, we’ll keep wearing the glasses even when not looking at a 3-D screen.

Of course, this is total speculation. But I’m quite certain we’ll have intelligent glasses, even if it takes a long time there, and this adoption avenue sounds plausible to me. They will then be the last screen we’ll buy.

The Economist writes (apparently quoting this pronouncement) that:

By 2017 there could be 7 trillion wirelessly connected devices and objects — about 1000 per person.

Personally, I think their timing is off: I can believe that the hardware can be built by 2017, but not that we figured out how to manage or use them. But regardless of the exact date, it’s going to happen sooner or later.

Look around where you are sitting right now. With this vision, in a few years, at least a hundred should be in sight right now.

The other day, I’m looking out the window on the street in front of our house, and see this elderly couple walking by our house. That happens all the time, of course, but this was different: both of them had Bluetooth headsets on their ears.

They looked like they had been married for a long time, like they were retired, and they were on a very normal afternoon stroll through the neighborhood. They didn’t look like the people who were on an urgent conference call while taking the kid to the park. Or like they were expecting a must-take call any minute. (both of them?)

They looked like they put on their headsets every morning as a matter of course, calls or no calls. I do that, too, some days, when I’m expecting to be on a bunch of calls and on the move (because I always misplace my headset on the move). But I don’t do it as a matter of course. And they were a generation older than me.

There is this transition between when something is a tool that I may or may not use, to something I attach to my body and in a way it becomes part of me. The transition to becoming a cyborg.

I figure our cyborgishness is growing exponentially:

First, our ancestors augmented their bodies with clothes to keep warmer, and put on shoes.

Glasses, for those who need them and could afford them.

The next one must have been the watch.

Now everybody has a cell phone. Not sure it qualifies as “part of us”.

But now we are apparently permanently adding headsets to our ears.

My guess is that augmented reality glasses will be next. Separate post on that.

One step at a time to being cyborgs. Perhaps more than one in the next decade. And all without a public outcry.

Kindle started the trend, and with the iPad now it is clear that books are gradually going electronic, just like music before them.

A few months ago, I banned all music CDs from our house, because all they did was collect dust. We had not touched a CD for years as iPods and iTunes took over. Looks like soon, we won’t touch many books either. Certainly the stack of magazines we read is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. It will be zero in 2020.

I’m sure I have a few books in our collection that won’t be available electronically in 2020, and we can’t rip them easily (unless Google really speeds up scanning …) So I’m not expecting an outright ban like for our CDs. But perhaps our house could do with 1000 or so less books than today. Imagine what we could do with all that space!

But more importantly:

• Barnes & Noble stores will go the way of the local Blockbuster.
• Public libraries … perhaps become glorified cyber cafes? Or iPad rental stations? Or go away? Shiny new public libraries worth millions may turn into obsolete dinosaurs much faster than city planners are suspecting.

Eventually, electronic books will also change the school system as we know it. Teachers, at least in the middle and higher grades, already have lost their traditional monopoly on knowledge. There are many students now who know much more about particular subjects than their teachers ever have.

But now image the future text book. iPad and the like will make it possible to go beyond copying the paper into PDF format, so to speak, which is what many electronic school books do today. It just the first step, like putting the equivalent of putting static brochures on the web, as many businesses did in the first years of the web.

Next-generation textbooks will make use of their always-on internet connectivity:

• to dynamically change the way they teach things based on what works better, based on real-time feedback from their customers
• to incorporate current events as they occur, e.g. for social study subjects
• be dynamic, e.g. let students interact with a (virtual) science experiment and see what happens.
• put more detailed reference information into hyperlinks everywhere over the book, for the more interested students
• add collaboration tools for more interesting (non-rote) homework…

The possibilities are endless. And at $499, and falling through 2020, very much viable given the cost of textbooks.

Strike off another “cultural institution” — books — for the dust bin. Unlike recoded music, books go back to the beginnings of civilization and in a way define what is history and what pre-history. If this is the end of books, perhaps we are now truly entering post-history.

This is not about 2020, but about right now.

I remember the first story I read about Amazon 10+ years ago. How Jeff Bezos moved to Seattle, set up shop across a bookstore, and sent people across the street to get the books that were ordered on www.amazon.com, so they could be mailed.

Today, Amazon is perhaps the greatest threat to Dell. Not because of the books. Not because they build better hardware (they don’t even build hardware, never mind better hardware). But because for me as a customer, the choices are: 1) buy a box, from Dell, or 2) rent something that walks, and talks, and feels like a box (although it isn’t a box) from Amazon. Whose hard drives don’t fail, whose ethernet cables don’t come lose and for which I don’t need to make sure I have an UPS.

I’m afraid to say that Amazon wins.

If I had to bet on who still exists in 2020 between the two of them, Amazon wins by 90 to 10.

Mystifying bit: why doesn’t Dell operate an EC2-like datacenter today? They got to realize that there are two kinds of computers customers are buying today, and they only sell the old one.

It is fashionable for corporations to declare their firm intentions to make the world a better place. If only one’s competitors wouldn’t embark on bad practices, then one would not have to copy them, or so the disclaimer usually goes.

Google’s threatened move out of China disrupts this excuse. You can bet that there are heated arguments right now in the strategy rooms of its Western competitors in China (Microsoft, Yahoo for search advertising according to this article) whether they should follow suit or shut up, kowtow and take the market share that’s up for grabs. Will men or mice emerge?

This could well turn out to be a watershed event for how the internet will look in 2020. If nobody follows Google’s bold move and nothing much happens, there is a good chance that more and more content filtering will be added to the internet, in China and otherwise. That’s the trajectory we are all on, unfortunately. (e.g. see this Wikipedia map on censorship) There will be workarounds, and hacks, to get at content anyway, just like in China today, and counter-hacks, and counter-counter-hacks, and so forth, but the net result is that content flows less freely.

On the other hand, if say, Yahoo declared their solidarity with Google today and threatened the same thing, it might well start an avalanche of Western firms saying, like Google, “enough is enough”. Imagine you have to defend, to your (mostly Western) users, that while the big guys are doing what your users think is the morally right stance, you are not. Not a great way of gaining users who love you. Yes, it would hurt to leave China; but it would also hurt to stay and lose Western customers instead.

In the best case, it would substantially slow and perhaps stop more censorship in the world outside of China for some time.

This is the kind of event that might have major ramifications for technology and society for years to come, which is why I’m putting it on this blog about technology in 2020.

So how are we going to interact with all of those screens?

Let’s first list what won’t work:

• keyboards: we’re not about to have a keyboard underneath each picture frame in our houses.
• mice: same as for keyboards. There also won’t be a table surface in front of each screen.
• tiny little buttons on the sides of the screen, like TVs have. It works, but can you imagine going from screen to screen in your house, a couple of dozen times, doing something on tiensy little buttons? I don’t think so. Some screens will be up the wall and out of reach anyway.
• a remote control for each of them, like so many of the digital picture frames today. Having to deal with (and find!) today’s remote controls is bad enough. It’s impossible to keep track of dozens of them. (”Oops, wrong screen” … let’s not go there)

What might work:

• touch. I know, that’s fashionable these days, but it won’t work for screens on the wall: they are too far away, and who would want fingerprints all over their images that require us to dust and polish the screens once a week.
• gestures, as interpreted by the screen’s camera (which will become a standard feature of screens). We’ll see whether that will find acceptance, but it does sound like a possibility.

This post was actually inspired by recent post by Fred Wilson. Like him, I had tried the wireless keyboard and all of that, and it doesn’t work unless you like to fiddle and are really, really patient, which I’m not. On his advice, I downloaded the Mobile Air Mouse application for the iPhone, and while it still lets lots to be desired, it works much better than any alternative.

So I’m betting on our “mobile phones” to become our universal remote controls that enable us to interact with the screens (and lots of other things) around us. Basic model: point and click. Turns out that Apple of course already has a Remote application on the iPhone/iPod Touch to control iTunes and AppleTV, and that model is very useful. It takes too long to boot and find the network, and of course it makes no sense that each device (screen, AppleTV, Wii Remote …) needs its own app with its own idiosyncracies, but those problems will be solved. (More about software in subsequent posts.)

I kind of like the idea of being able to control my surroundings from the device I have in pocket already anyway.

Perhaps the rate of technological change is indeed accelerating. One can’t even make a few outlandish predictions any more (as I did on this blog last week) without being passed on the right by actual events. Take the past week’s CES:

On the subject of 3D TVs, I’ll just note that the world’s software developers will have to learn how to write 3D user interfaces. It can only be a matter of time until 3D displays show up as PC monitors. It’s cute and impressive and all that, but not transformational.

But there were several items of major news that are transformational from the perspective of this blog:

1. Intel announced what’s essentially a new monitor cable standard, except without a cable. Called WiDi, it enables PCs to send their graphics to displays wirelessly. White not many details are available yet, according to CNET, the first enabled systems are supposed to show up in stores next week! They are building it into the standard Intel chip sets starting this year, so wide distribution is virtually assured. Netgear is already selling a HDMI-output bridge box which allows any TV to become a receiver. So by the end of this month, theoretically we should all be able to use any display in the house as a PC monitor, wirelessly. This technology will be a major enabler for the vision I outlined in the last post. It’s coming a earlier than I thought. I hope it isn’t just for video, but for all kinds of PC graphics.
2. Skype announced a push to have TV manufacturers embed Skype directly in TVs, no PC required. LG and Panasonic have already signed up. Note this is competitive, in a way, with WiDi, because it will give me a choice to display Skype videoconferences via my PC and WiDi, or with the Skype client built into my TV. (That’s a new kind of competition.) But most interestingly, they will modify their TVs to also include a camera and intelligent microphones, so audio quality is good enough when people move about the room.
3. Microsoft’s “Natal” add-on for Xbox will essentially give the Xbox a Wii controller — except, without the controller. It accomplishes this by using a camera and audio processing that together essentially can tell what is going on in front of the display.

If we add these things together, what do we get?

• Displays of the future will have microphones and cameras built-in, so they will not only show us stuff, but they will also look at us, and observe us what we do.
• Not only will all the picture frames in the house becomes dynamic displays, they will be connected to each other in various ways, including to the PCs and laptops (and mobile devices) in the house, using bidirectional data streams.
• Add 3D, and the (moving) picture on the wall becomes a 3D “window” to look out of, and through which others (via the cameras and microphones) look in.

I’m feeling like my house just had its walls torn down. And I’ll get (looking at the positive side) an all-knowing butler that watches every single move I make, serving whatever information is best for me at that time right in front of me. (Let’s ignore the scary side for today…)

[As I'm writing this post, the news comes in that Skype HD videoconferencing will be built into TV sets starting this year. This is exactly what I'm talking about in this post as opening up all sorts of new possibilities.]

Let’s compare some prices for flat-panel displays (from Dell, cheapest available alternative chosen):

That means prices have dropped by about 33% a year. This trend may not continue all the way to 2020, but it’s clear that high-resolution screens will continue to be in abundant supply at ever-lower prices. There is a separate trend to ever-large living room TV sets, but in this post, I’m focusing on ever-cheaper screens at about that 20-in size.

We have about two dozen picture frames in our house, of the wood-and-cardboard variety, most of which show enlarged photographs that I shot at some time or other. Most of the pictures are years old, as I’m just too lazy and cheap to get newer pictures enlarged and hung up. More than half of those picture frames are about the size of that 20-inch screen. I just checked, a comparable-size picture frame that looks half-reasonable costs about $30, plus $15 for the picture to be printed at that format.

It appears to me that once 20-inch screens are available at less than $100 (and networking has been sorted out, a subject for a separate post), a gigantic new market opens up for display manufacturers: replace all the picture frames in all houses with digital versions.

That potential market is something like a dozen time larger than the market for PC monitors or even TV sets, so you can bet that screen manufacturers will go after it with force, and certainly before 2020.

Note what I have in mind here is a different thing than the cute little digital picture frame thingies that also want to be your MP3 player and only take SD Cards so you never know what they will show when you put one in. I’m talking about real displays with multi-megapixel resolution that you would not mind sitting in front of for a whole day. That can display fast-moving graphics. And, most of all, that are networked.

Imagine your house or apartment with all your pictures frames replaced with high-resolution monitors in the same place and with the same form factor. Initially, they show the exact same pictures. But they can and will change … some fast, some slow:

• the picture at the breakfast table automatically shows you financial news at breakfast time, but that gorgeous shot from top of Half Dome the rest of the day
• the picture frame over the fireplace in your family room has always-on videoconferencing (per Skype’s announcement today) with your kids’ grandparents
• a picture frame in your office switches between the breaking news affecting your company and the snow forecast for skiing on the weekend
• the picture frame in the hallway is pulling new pictures off the internet of the grand square in Marrakech that you would love to visit on an upcoming vacation
• of course, so many picture frames show stills that you took, automatically taken from wherever your store your pictures, like the AppleTV does, or Roku (side note: the screen saver on our AppleTV has done probably more than anything else to convince me that you want your photographis to be around you at all times, not just when you open the album or run the software)
• another picture frame slowly cycles through the pictures taking by your closest friends and family
• the small picture frame on your way out to the garage shows you, in the morning, today’s schedule
• the one in your bedroom shows new acquisitions from the local museum, a different one every week, with a focus on Fresh impressionists, say
• if you are so inclined, the one in the kitchen one shows you today’s specials at Fry’s (or your local butcher).

Of course, all of this can be done technically today on your PC’s screen, and perhaps on your TV’s screen, and so this is a very easy prediction. But things change very fundamentally once it moves off your highly contested PC monitor real estate or main TV real estate, to a dozen or more locations around your house that are just made for showing pictures. (We can be sure of that, you hung pictures up in that very spot!) It totally changes your house. It totally changes your relationship to things outside of the house. It would be like you have new windows in your house, each of which tunnels a view to a totally different neighborhood, in real-time if you so like. Who needs the PC to interact with the world? The world is coming to your house.

This kind of environment will pose some rather interesting challenges for hardware and software architecture, as well as for usability, and I’ll post about those some other day. But it also opens up a lot of possibilities, technically and commercially.

P.S. I would not be surprised if Apple made the first baby steps towards those with the rumored Apple tablet. Tablet == portable networked picture frame with touch screen? Would not be a bad market entry product for this kind of vision…

Update 2010-01-06: LG today announced a screen only 7 mm thick. That’s better than my picture frames!