The first part of article’s title, “Microsoft’s big bet,” says a lot. For a company that still commands the largest marketshare in the PC industry, they are virtually betting the company on Windows 8. How could this be? The reason is pretty simple: Microsoft is attempting to navigate a technology transition unlike any it has ever attempted before. And as I referenced in a previous article, transitions are where tech companies go to die. From the mainframe era, to the PC era, to the Internet era, and so on, history is littered with the remains of companies that failed during times of transition. We are in the middle of the transition to The New World of Technology and Microsoft has missed the boat up to this point. They realize that they can no longer afford to rest on their laurels, but Microsoft has very little experience playing from behind. Given the incredibly rapid pace the technology industry is transitioning, Microsoft is scrambling to do something – anything. But without a clear vision of how to make Windows fit into The New World of Technology, Microsoft appears to be trying to change Windows for change’s sake.

A quote from the article sums up Microsoft’s predicament nicely,

Windows 8 has become a “Franken-system” of mish-mashed ideas, thoughts and concepts. Microsoft is desperately trying to make the forthcoming operating system a one-size-fits-all solution to everyone’s troubles.

With Microsoft betting the company, going “all in” with a Franken-system Windows 8 seems like a highly risky play. But Microsoft seems desperate and given how far they are behind, it may be their only move. Windows 8 can’t be just “good enough”. It has to be game changing if it is to preserve the current user base of Windows while transitioning to the new world of tablet devices. Microsoft needs a home run and they are definitely swinging for the fences – but in this case they only have one strike left and they aren’t very good at hitting curveballs.

This information is all well and good, but it doesn’t really take a rocket scientist to see this trend. As the article I linked to summarizes, tablets are quickly becoming the portable PC of choice. But not 5 years in the future – it’s happening today. However, the term “tablets” is far too generic. As I’ve said before (and others are as well), Apple’s iPad so thoroughly dominates the industry that there is no “tablet” market – there is only an iPad market. We’ve already seen that the “iPad Effect” is significantly cutting into PC marketshare. So the reality is that iPads are quickly becoming the portable PC of choice. Research firms are usually fairly conservative in their reports. So we should probably expect that given Apple’s success over the last several years, the predictions by this research firm will probably either happen much quicker or to a degree much bigger than they predict.

This report acknowledges that the tablet market has been dominated by Apple. But in the usual conservative nature of the industry, it also predicts that others will begin to make inroads, believing that the Android operating system will have 40% of the market in five years. However they base this prediction on the assumption that, “competitors become better attuned to consumer preferences and find opportunities to break new ground …” Given the way that Apple’s competitors have yet to figure out why Apple has been and continues to be a runaway success, this assumption is very weak. More likely, given Apple’s lead in the industry, it will be many, many years before anyone can “catch up”, and by then Apple may have moved on to the next big thing. If anyone thinks this isn’t possible, just take a look at the iPod market. Apple still dominates after over 10 years and the battlefield is littered with the corpses of competing devices that failed. Basically the iPod’s only competition are Apple’s own new iOS devices. The iPhone is responsible for any decline in iPod sales, but if you consider the iPhone (and the iPad) to be an iPod, then it obviously isn’t any decline at all.

The bottom line is that the future is already here. We don’t need to wait five years. Apples’s iPad is the future and the present. Other devices are years away from even getting close to where the iPad is today. But many people and business are waiting. And that is a recipe for failure. The New World of Technology gives everyone a chance to get on an even playing field. There are no more excuses for being “technology illiterate”. If you do fall behind, the only person to blame will be yourself.

As amazing as the new iPad’s display is, the practical matter is that the iPad 2′s display is more than plenty capable for just about any purpose. Even as I had an iPad 2 and a new iPad side-by-side comparing the difference, I had to concede that the differences were simply not that great from a very pragmatic viewpoint. If $100 makes the difference between having an iPad vs. not having an iPad, then I could not argue against getting the iPad 2 at its new price point. About the only caveat I would make is for the purposes of reading. If someone is planning to buy an iPad for heavy use as an e-reader, I think the extra $100 is worth it. And maybe photographers or creative professionals would appreciate the extra resolution. But for average use, the extra $100 isn’t worth it if it makes or breaks the purchase.

It is entirely conceivable that the new lower price of the iPad 2 16 GB models will spur growth of the iPad into more price-conscious markets. Just how large that growth will be is yet to be seen. But it is possible that while the new iPad will garner all the headlines for months to come, when all is said and done the biggest impact on the technology market may come from the iPad 2.

However, I must give credit where credit is due. I did not come up with the New World/Old World term. That was Steven Frank, co-founder of the company Panic, Inc. and a fellow technology enthusiast. I was introduced to the term by a wonderfully written article he authored right after the iPad was introduced. When I first read that article it was as if I was reading my own thoughts and I knew that he hit the nail perfectly on the head with the New World/Old World phrasing. So I borrowed the term and linked to his article where I referenced it.

Last year I was reviewing some of my old articles and found my link to Steven’s article. I wanted to read it again, so I clicked on the link and found that the article had been removed! It seems Steven is very picky about his writing and decided to take his old blog down. I almost panicked and tracked down Steven to ask if he would re-post it or give it to me so I could re-post it. He graciously sent me his article and gave me permission to re-post his writing here. It was only later after my near-panic attack that I found the original article had been saved on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. But I think this article deserves a place of its own – and so that I may continue to give him the proper credit – here in its entirely is Steven Frank’s blog post introducing the New World/Old World terminology. I encourage you to read it because I think it is as relevant today as it was 2 years ago.

Steven Frank, January 28, 2010, 10:20 pm,

I need to talk to you about computers. I’ve been on a veritable roller-coaster of “how I feel” about the iPad announcement, and trying not to write about it until I had at least an inkling of what was at the root of that.

Before we begin, a reminder: On this blog, I speak only for myself, not for my company or my co-workers.

The thing is, to talk about specific hardware (like the iPad or iPhone or Nexus One or Droid) is to miss entirely the point I’m about to try to make. This is more important than USB ports, GPS modules, or front-facing cameras. Gigabytes, gigahertz, megapixels, screen resolution, physical dimensions, form factors, in fact hardware in general — these are all irrelevant to the following discussion. So, I’m going to try to completely avoid talking about those sorts of things.

Let’s instead establish some new terminology: Old World and New World computing.

Introduction

Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.

In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves. A lot of thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say, “Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse interface can’t be the end of the road? What’s next?”

Then “next” arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself included) that we looked at it said, “What in the shit is this?”

The Old World

In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.

The New World

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.

Floppy Disks

An anecdote: When the iMac came out, Apple drew a line in the sand. They said: we are no longer going to ship a computer with a floppy disk drive. The entire industry shit its pants so loudly and forcefully that you probably could have heard it from outer space.

Are you insane? I spent all this money on a floppy drive! All my software is on floppy disks! You’ve committed brand suicide! Nobody will stand for this!

Fast-forward to today. I can’t think of a single useful thing to do with a floppy disk. I can go to the supermarket and buy a CD, DVD, or flash drive that is faster, smaller, and stores 1,000 times as much data for typically less than a box of floppies used to cost. Or better still, we can just toss things to each other over the network.

To get there, yes, we had to throw away some of our investment in hardware. We had to re-think how we did things. It required adjustment. A bit of sacrifice. The end result, I think we can all agree regardless of what platform we use, is orders of magnitude more convenient, easier to use, and in line with today’s storage requirements.

Staying with floppies would have spared us the inconvenience of that transition but at what long-term cost?

Nothing is ever simply black or white. There was a cost to making the transition. But there was a benefit to doing so.

To change was not all good. To stay put was not all bad. But there was a ratio of goodness-to-badness that, in the long run, was quite favorable for everyone involved. However in the short term it seemed so insurmountable, so ludicrous, that it beggared the belief of a large number of otherwise very intelligent people.

For a species so famous for being adaptable to its environment, we certainly abhor change. Especially a change that involves any amount of money being spent.

Cars

John Gruber used car transmissions for his analogy, and it’s apt. When I learned to drive, my dad insisted that I learn on a manual transmission so I would be able to drive any car. I think this was a wise and valuable thing to do.

But even having learned it, these days I drive an automatic. Nothing is black and white — I sacrifice maybe a tiny amount of fuel efficiency and a certain amount of control over my car in adverse situations that I generally never encounter. In exchange, my brain is freed up to focus on the the road ahead, getting where I’m going, and avoiding obstacles (strategy), not the minutiae of choosing the best possible gear ratio (tactics).

Is a stick shift better than an automatic? No. Is an automatic better than a stick? No. This misses the point. A better question: Is a road full of drivers not distracted by the arcane inner workings of their vehicle safer? It’s likely. And that has a value. Possibly a value that outweighs the value offered by a stick shift if we aggregate it across everyone in the world who drives.

Changing of the Guard

When I think about the age ranges of people who fall into the Old World of computing, it is roughly bell-curved with Generation X (hello) approximately in the center. That, to me, is fascinating — Old World users are sandwiched between New World users who are both younger and older than them.

Some elder family members of mine recently got New World cell phones. I watched as they loaded dozens of apps willy-nilly onto them which, on any other phone, would have turned it into a sluggish, crash-prone battery-vampire. But it didn’t happen. I no longer get summoned for phone help, because it is self-evident how to use it, and things just generally don’t go wrong like they used to on their Old World devices.

New Worlders have no reason to be gun-shy about loading up their device with apps. Why would that break anything? Old Worlders on the other hand have been browbeaten to the point of expecting such behavior to lead to problems. We’re genuinely surprised when it doesn’t.

But the New World scares the living hell out of a lot of the Old Worlders. Why is that?

The Needs of the Few

When the iPhone came out, I was immediately in love, but frustrated by the lack of an SDK. When an SDK came out, I was overjoyed, but frustrated by Apple’s process. As some high-profile problems began to pile up, I infamously railed against the whole idea right here on this very blog. I announced I was beginning a boycott of iPhone-based devices until changes were made, and I certainly, certainly was not going to buy any future iPhone-based products. I switched to various other devices that were a bit more friendly to Old Worlders.

It lasted all of a month.

For as frustrated as I was with the restrictions, those exact same restrictions made the New World device a high-performance, high-reliability, absolute workhorse of a machine that got out of my way and just let me get things accomplished.

Nothing is simply black or white.

Old Worlders are particularly sensitive to certain things that are simply non-issues to New Worlders. We learned about computers from the inside out. Many of us became interested in computers because they were hackable, open, and without restrictions. We worry that these New World devices are stifling the next generation of programmers. But can anyone point to evidence that that’s really happening? I don’t know about you, but I see more people carrying handheld computers than at any point in history. If even a small percentage of them are interested in “what makes this thing tick?” then we’ve got quite a few new programmers in the pipeline.

The reason I’m starting to think the Old World is ultimately doomed is because we are bracketed on both sides by the New World, and those people being born today, post-iPhone and post-iPad, will never know (and probably not care) about how things used to work. Just as nobody today cares about floppies, and nobody has to care about manual transmissions if they don’t want to.

If you total up everyone older than the beginning of the Old World, and every person yet to be born, you end up with a much greater number of people than there are in the Old World.

And to that dramatically greater number of people, what do you think is more important? An easy-to-use, crash-proof device? Or a massively complex tangle of toolbars, menus, and windows because that’s what props up an entrenched software oligarchy?

Fellow Old Worlders, I hate to tell you this: we are a minority. The question is not “will the desktop metaphor go away?” The question is “why has it taken this long for the desktop metaphor to go away?”

But, But I’m a Professional!

This is a great toy for newbies, but how am I supposed to get any SERIOUS work done with it? After all, I’m a PRO EXPERT MEGA USER! I MUST HAVE TOOLBARS, WINDOWS, AND…

OK, stop for a second.

First, I would put the birth of New World computing at 2007, with the introduction of the iPhone. You could even arguably stretch it a bit further back to the birth of “Web 2.0” applications in the early 2000s. But it’s brand new. If computers in general are young, New World computing is fresh out of the womb, covered in blood and screaming.

It’s got a bit of development to go.

I encourage you to look at this argument in terms of what you are really trying to achieve rather than the way you are used to going about it.

Let’s pick a ridiculous example and say I work in digital video, and I need to encode huge amounts of video data into some advanced format, and send that off to a server somewhere. I could never do that on an iPad! Right?

Well, no, today, probably not. But could you do it on a future New World computer in the general sense?

Remember, the hardware is a non-issue: Flash storage will grow to terabytes in size. CPUs will continue to multiply in power as they always have. Displays, batteries, everything will improve given enough time.

As I see it, many of these “BUT I’M AN EXPERT” situations can be resolved by making just a few key modifications:

1. A managed way of putting processes in the background. New Worlders are benefiting already from the improved performance and battery life provided by the inability to run a task in the background. Meanwhile, Old Worlders are tearing their hair out. I CAN’T MULTITASK, right? It seems like there has to be a reasonable middle ground. Maybe processes can petition the OS for background time. Maybe a user can “opt-in” to background processes. I don’t know. But it seems like there must be an in-between that doesn’t sacrifice what we’ve gained for some of the flexibility we’re used to.
2. A way of sharing data with other devices. New World devices are easy to learn and highly usable because they do not expose the filesystem to users and they are “data islands”. We are no longer working with “files” but we are still working with data blobs that it would be valuable to be able to exchange with each other. Perhaps the network wins here. Perhaps flash drives that we never see the contents of. The Newton was, to my knowledge, the first generally available device where you could just say “put this app and all data I’ve created with it on this removable card” without ever once seeing a file or a folder. Its sizable Achilles’ Heel was that only other Newtons understood the data format.
3. A way of sharing data between applications. Something like the clipboard, but bigger. This is not a filesystem, but a way of saying “bring this data object from this app to this app”. I’ve made this painting in my painting app, and now I want to bring it over here to crop it and apply filters.

By just addressing those three things (and I admit they are not simple feats), I think all but the absolutely most specialized of computer tasks become quite feasible on a New World device.

A Bet on the Future

Apple is calling the iPad a “third category” between phones and laptops. I am increasingly convinced that this is just to make it palatable to you while everything shifts to New World ideology over the next 10-20 years.

Just like with floppy disks, the rest of the industry is quite content to let Apple be the ones to stick their necks out on this. It’s a gamble to be sure. But if Apple wins the gamble (so far it’s going well), they are going to be years and years ahead of their competition. If Apple loses the gamble, well, they have no debt and are sitting on a Fort Knox-like pile of cash. It’s not going to sink them.

The bet is roughly that the future of computing:

1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps

All in all, it sounds like a pretty feasible outcome, and really not a bad one at that.

But we Old Worlders have to come to grips with the fact that a lot of things we are used to are going away. Maybe not for a while, but they are.

Will the whole industry move to New World computing? Not unless Apple is demonstrably successful with this approach. So I’d say you’re unlikely to see it universally applied to all computing devices within the next couple of decades.

But Wednesday’s keynote tells me this is where Apple is going. Plan accordingly.

How long will it take to complete this Old World to New World shift? My guess? The end is near when you can bootstrap a new iPad application on an iPad. When you can comfortably do that without pining for a traditional desktop, the days of Old World computing are officially numbered.

The iPad as a particular device is not necessarily the future of computing. But as an ideology, I think it just might be. In hindsight, I think arguments over “why would I buy this if I already have a phone and a laptop?” are going to seem as silly as “why would I buy an iPod if it has less space than a Nomad?”

Of course, HP responded to Apple’s claim by saying, predictably, that traditional PCs aren’t dead and that a lot of people and companies still rely on them. Way to be stuck in the past, HP. But then they also stated that “… if you’re sending Junior off to college, the first computing product needed for homework is a PC.” Really? What exactly do you mean by that HP? Are college students actually required to purchase PCs? Or have they been increasingly choosing Apple’s Macintosh over the last 5 – 10 years? And could it just be possible that students are discovering that they can actually do most of their homework on an iPad? This isn’t even considering that in a year or two, students could be reading all of their textbooks from their iPads.

But seriously, what else would you expect to hear from a company that killed their tablet product and has nothing to sell but traditional PCs? HP’s former CEO specifically said that the “tablet effect is real“. Now there are some hard numbers to back that up. The Old World of Technology is ending right before our very eyes. If you haven’t already noticed, perhaps this is your wake-up call?

The 4G LTE feature is certainly a big deal, as 4G speeds can be significantly faster than 3G. For those that use their iPads on the cellular wireless networks, this is a welcome new feature. However, given the limited reach of 4G networks, plus the fact that many people use their iPads over Wi-Fi, the 4G feature is not all that groundbreaking.

The feature that Apple spent the most time on was the new display and graphics performance. Given that the resolution of the New iPad is 4 times higher than the iPad 2, it is quite a significant upgrade. Listening to Apple talk about it, the new screen, which they call a “Retina Display”, redefines the iPad. Interestingly enough, Apple claimed that this is the first device they can not adequately represent through their on-stage projection system because the resolution of the iPad is better than the projection system. They repeatedly asserted that in order to appreciate the Retina Display of the New iPad, one needs to see it directly with their own eyes. That is a pretty strong claim.

Also, Apple announced that they will continue to sell the 16 GB iPad 2 model (Wi-Fi only and 3G models) at $100 off their original pricing. For $399 and $529 respectively, it will be interesting to see how the iPad 2 continues to sell. I’ve been told by many people they were waiting for the price of the iPad 2 to drop before buying an iPad.

My recommendation is to wait until you’ve seen the New iPad in person before making the decision between it and the iPad 2. If Apple’s claims are true that the Retina Display redefines the iPad, it is worth taking a look before purchasing.

The author bases his argument that the iPad is not the best tablet primarily upon another story that is linked within his article. That story states, “As we detailed in our Thrive [a tablet device] review, the full-sized USB port, HDMI port, and SD card make it a more productive tablet than the iPad.” Both authors have a pretty specific definition of “productive”, being that one can plug various other technology into a device without “expensive accessories”.

And thus, we quickly see why so many “techies” have a hard time figuring out why the general public loves their iOS devices: techies think that in order for a device to be “productive”, the device must have specific technology features. The general public knows that being productive means that the device works reliably, is easy to use, and does what they want it to do. Most people could care less about ports. They have found little need to physically connect other things as much as some would lead them to believe. If you don’t believe me, the numbers the author claims to be astounded by should be the proof. If the general public had such a great need for ports or other technical specs, then the iPad would not continue to sell so well – especially to business users.

The author states that he is astounded by the sales figures of the iPad, “considering how little you can do on an iPad out of the box”. I would find his opinion astounding, except for the fact that I have had many conversations like this with techie-types since the iPhone first came out. It simply comes down to the different ways of thinking the “Old World of Technology” has as compared to the “New World of Technology”. Again, he believes the iPad is limited because one can’t plug things into it right out of the box. Most other people believe the iPad is limitless out of the box because they can so quickly and easily get it working. Right away they are on the App Store downloading from an incredible selection of software that will make them productive without the need of a USB device, an SD card, or an HDMI cable. No other company can match the ease-of-use and user experience that Apple has provided for the iPad (and all iOS devices). This is the secret to Apple’s success and everyone else is struggling to simply copy Apple’s hardware – and still missing the point entirely!. The hardware is not so important when compared to the entire user experience.

And if we want to throw down when it comes to technology features, I could argue that technologies like AirPlay make physical connectivity a thing of the past. Why bother with USB and HDMI when one can wirelessly stream their media? Especially when one can still have physical connectivity IF they need it with OPTIONAL accessories (and I don’t agree that a $29 adapter is expensive). No other tablet has a feature that even comes close to the reliability, ease-of-use, and acceptance of AirPlay, so if we want to play the geek card I think Apple still has ‘em beat.

It is also important to note that Jobs has been elected Apple’s chairman of the board and director. While this is being reported as fact, it seems that many are also missing the significance of this development. Steve Jobs is still going to exert his influence on Apple. While he may have officially given up CEO duties, his real value to Apple is not lost.

As Steven Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, made famous, there is a crucial difference between leadership and management.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

Leaders provide the vision and set the direction of their organization. Managers carry out the mission that the leaders have defined. Steve Jobs has clearly brought back the vision to Apple that it was lacking in the late 80′s and 90′s. With that vision, Apple has become the largest company in the world and has completely changed the technology industry and the world in general. Luckily for Apple (and perhaps all of us), Steve Jobs’ visionary mind is still around and he will continue to put his mark on the new world of technology he helped kickstart.

I first wrote about this almost exactly two years ago, but I had observed this trend at least a couple of years earlier. Yet it seems that some big companies still don’t get it. Case in point, I recently read an article where a self-described “loyal BlackBerry user and fan of RIM” explained why he made the difficult decision to return his RIM PlayBook (also commonly known as the BlackBerry PlayBook). Even though he feels the PlayBook is technically superior in some ways to the iPad , his reasons for returning the device were not about the technology.

He gave three reasons why he felt that RIM was “screwing it up”. His first was “Not recognizing the consumer power shift”. To quote the article:

The fundamental pattern of technology adoption is shifting. In the old world, in which corporate IT departments determined which technology to approve and employees (users) simply had to follow suit, BlackBerry wielded a clear advantage. IT departments loved RIM’s solution for its security and reliability.

But the winds of adoption are shifting. Employees are in the driver’s seat. They are convincing their IT departments to adopt the platforms employees desire. The winners of tomorrow need to create solutions that appeal to consumers, not just their employers.

He then goes on to say that

Such adoption shifts have taken down giants.

He gives an example of beer purchasing in Japan, but we have examples much closer to home with Blockbuster and Borders. Companies failing to see changes in technology affecting consumer choices is a key reason they fail. This is nothing new, but yet it still seems that the lesson has not been learned – or many companies are just bad at executing change.

It took me 45 minutes from opening the box to being able to explore my new PlayBook. When my wife bought her iPad, she was already connected, and exploring within 10 minutes.

It’s time to make sure your company is recognizing the changing tides in technology. Don’t be late to the party like Blockbuster, Borders, and RIM.