Wired has some
top trends for 2006. I disagree with almost all of them.
"We've done 20 years of adding functionality, and 99 percent of that functionality isn't needed," Pearson said. "There will be an enormous market over the next several years for really simple stuff."
If this were the case, Microsoft Word would be as streamlined as it was a decade ago (and even then it wasn't very). And people love their camera phones (there's no accounting for taste). And seeing how many Blackberries and Treos I saw at a recent conference in NYC, folks like the idea of not having to schlep a lot of devices around with them.
How about mapping programs that show us whether anyone we'd like to see is nearby.
No!
R.I.P. combustion engine
I don't envision this happening for at least a generation--if at all. Once the current gas crisis (if anyone even thinks of it as such anynore) ebbs, it's back to the SUVs. Yes, the 1970s gas crisis (which was much worse than what we're experiencing now) ended the age of the Lincoln Continental and those huge 1970s cars and brought about the compact car craze, but a decade after that it was huge hulking vehicles again. We all have very short memories.
Futurists have been warning about our over-consumptive, pollution- and nonbiodegradable-waste-generating ways for decades. Lately, those warnings are getting more strident
Nah, it'll take some horrible crisis to change anyone's behaviors and I suspect any changes will be short-lived.
No comments:
Post a Comment