What Can We Expect From The Next Decade of Technology?

Technology tends to run in cycles. Microsoft ruled the 90s by building essential software for enterprises. Then Apple created a new device driven marketplace in which the consumer was king. What will drive the next decade?

While these things are always hard to predict with any specificity, much of the writing is already on the wall. Humanlike, no-touch interfaces will be combined with a pervasive array of sensors and intelligent back-end systems to form a new Web of Things. Computing will become truly ubiquitous.

This new era of computing will be different than anything we’ve seen before. Technology will cease to be something we turn on and off, but will become an inextricable part of not only our environment, but ourselves. It is a future that is both utopian and dystopian (depending on your perspective), in that the human experience will change dramatically.

4 Digital Laws

When William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed,” he meant that the seeds of the future are sown in the present. While there is no telling the exact composition of the fruit that those seeds will bear, we can expect the stalks to grow according to the laws already apparent.

The information economy has been around long enough for us to have identified four digital laws that drive the growth and direction of technology:

Moore’s Law: Back in the 80s and 90s, when computers first landed on our desktops, we were mostly concerned with processing power, because we wanted to be sure that our hardware would be capable of running the software that made computers useful.

Today, however, most of us pay little attention to processing speeds because we’re confident that whatever device we buy will be fast enough. That’s because of Moore’s law, a principle first identified by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965 which states that the power of our chips doubles about every 18 months.

Kryder’s Law: When Steve Jobs first returned to Apple, he revamped the product line and then went searching for the next big thing. An avid music fan, he was disappointed with the primitive MP3 devices on the market and envisioned a new product that would allow him to carry around 1000 songs in his pocket.

In a matter of months, his team identified a supplier which could deliver drives that were both small enough and powerful enough to make good on his vision. The iPod was born and Apple was on its way to becoming the most valuable company on the planet.

Of course, 1000 songs is no big dea anymore. Today’s iPods carry 40,000 and you can buy a drive that can play 1000 full length movies for a few hundred dollars, less than the price of those original iPods. This is thanks to Kryder’s law, which doubles storage about every 12 months, even faster than Moore’s law increases processing power.

Nielsen’s Law: Even after we stopped worrying about the speed of our computers and our hard drives became big enough that we didn’t need to clean out our e-mail archives every month, we still had trouble accessing content because Internet connections were so slow. Now with 4G mobile connections, we scarcely have to worry about it.

Credits to Forbes