Future Tense — Intro

With TNL.net down for most of the last month, I’ve been lax in cre­at­ing new entries. How­ever, being away gave me some per­spec­tive and I think that the for­est is now becom­ing clearer. In this entry, I reflect on trends that will affect us over the next decade.

Core Com­po­nents

One of my favorite quotes about the future comes from William Gib­son: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly dis­trib­uted yet.” Based on this, it is rel­a­tively easy to make future pre­dic­tions by look­ing at some of the core things that are hap­pen­ing today.

Some of the trends I’m start­ing to look at in terms of defin­ing how the next gen­er­a­tion will work include

• The rise of always-on high-speed inter­net connections
• The IPza­tion of everything
• The drop in the price of real-world sensors
• The rise of par­tic­i­pa­tory applications

Look­ing at each of the com­po­nents indi­vid­u­ally, it is hard to form a pic­ture of where the world is going. How­ever, look­ing at them together and how they inter­act, a pic­ture starts to form.

A seis­mic gen­er­a­tional shift

We are now start­ing to reach the tip­ping point in what will be a major gen­er­a­tional shift. Over the next few years, peo­ple who were born in the Inter­net era (ie. after the Inter­net became com­mon­place) will start enter­ing the work­force. In a way, my gen­er­a­tion (I’m 35) was too old to be part of this shift. Younger peo­ple, how­ever, are used to a word where IM, email, SMS, and always-on com­mu­ni­ca­tion is an inalien­able right.

I believe this will force com­pa­nies to start drop­ping restric­tions on such uses of the net­work. Already, we are see­ing more cor­po­ra­tions adopt Instant Mes­sag­ing (IM) as an approved form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion (pri­mar­ily for cor­po­ra­tions with widely dis­trib­uted work­force) to tag along with email, which has now become a de-facto in busi­ness. IM has changed some of the fac­tors inher­ent to com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the past: tra­di­tion­ally, com­mu­ni­ca­tion between mem­bers of a dis­trib­uted work­force was slow and rel­a­tively inef­fi­cient (yes, even Email had some inef­fi­cien­cies in terms of pro­duc­tiv­ity.) As things like IM, video IM, and shared appli­ca­tions over IM, take hold, work­ers can now have meet­ings with far­away places in the same fash­ion as they used to with their co-workers in a sim­i­lar phys­i­cal setting.

As those phys­i­cal bound­aries start to drop, what’s hap­pen­ing is also a rethink­ing of how teams are orga­nized (with a grow­ing empha­sis on dis­trib­uted vir­tual teams) and where peo­ple have to be to work (it doesn’t mat­ter as much any more). Some smaller start-ups even forego the idea of hav­ing much of a phys­i­cal loca­tion (for exam­ple, WeblogInc, which my friend Jason Cala­ca­nis sold to AOL last year, had no phys­i­cal office prior to the sale).

RSS, while still nascent, is also start­ing to take hold in com­pa­nies. As it becomes more and more of the way data is exchanged, RSS will start replac­ing other meth­ods of giv­ing updates. With the per­vasi­ness of RSS as a deliv­ery enve­lope (and, since it sup­ports enclo­sures, RSS can deliver any type of data), the way sites are authored in the future will be not through a cen­tral­ized approach (as is the cur­rent model, with a web server being con­nected in a one to one rela­tion­ship with a data stor­age piece like a data­base) but through a decen­tral­ized model where spe­cial­ized sites will offer nar­rowly focused types of ser­vices that will then be aggre­gated on a page. The early indi­ca­tions of this shift can be seen in the “mashups” of sites like Google Map and craigslist, for exam­ple and I believe the next gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple enter­ing the work­force will demand such free­dom to recom­bine sys­tems in the future. Along with the recom­bi­na­tion of appli­ca­tions, they will also demand that such flex­i­bil­ity exist in the way they work and we will see the rise of a more mod­u­lar and flex­i­ble work­force, with vir­tual teams replac­ing the more rigid struc­tures that cur­rently exist in corporations.

This is the first arti­cle in a 6 part series. You can read the fol­low­ing parts here:

• Part 1: Intro
• Part 2: Always on
• Part 3: IPzation
• Part 4: Sensors
• Part 5: Par­tic­i­pa­tory Applications
• Part 6: Conclusion

Related Terms

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