Upon2020 (archive)
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Let’s start simple: PC Hardware in 2020
The venerable PC will still be with us in 2020 I would think. It will have lost importance, just like it lost importance in the last decade with the emergence of iPhones and Wiis and TiVos. But it will still be there in its boxy under-the-table incarnation, and its in-the-briefcase and on-the-lap incarnation. People will…
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Technology’s Future Is Deeply Inertwingled
There was a time when we could talk about the future of, say, Radio, or of PBX systems. Some people, blissfully left in a different century, still do. But we really can’t any more. As Ted Nelson said: Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they…
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Be Afraid, Carriers, Be Very Afraid
Morgan Stanley has published a very detailed report on the state of the mobile internet. Best of all, for free. (How did that happen? But then, I’m not complaining …) Out of the hundreds of slides, I’m quoting two which speak for themselves. Notice that ARPU is going down at the same time many markets…
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From 1 to a billion in 5 years. What a little URL can do.
It was at the end of 2004 when I decided to start telling the world about this silly little idea I had had about a year before: give every person on the internet a URL that they could use to identify themselves to any website. Fully decentralized, no permission needed from anybody, under control of…
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The Credentialed Account Provisioning Anti-Pattern
I wanted to write about this for a long time. A wait in the doctor’s office has its uses … Here is an example scenario from the real world: Like many schools these days, my son’s school has a website where teachers enter current assignments and grades, and students and parents like me can check…