I believe that its failure was guaranteed no matter how powerful its designers made it. It wasn’t because of the applications or even its form factor, no its size and note taking, calendar, contacts and other apps including eMail capabilities were all fine for their day. It all came down to the user experience. Using the stylus with the on screen keyboard or worse, the built in handwriting recognition was unbearable.  This highlights something that technology companies regularly forget and it’s why Steve Jobs killed the Newton when he took back control of Apple: The user experience matters. A lot.

The Palm Pilot with its graffiti was first, then the BlackBerry with its thumb friendly keyboard and then the iPhone with its quick responding multi-touch screen. At each stage the innovation wasn’t the devices capabilities, plenty of devices have done what they did before them. The innovation was the user experience that enabled the technology and made it accessible. The iPhone’s multi-touch interface made it a usable applications platform and everyday device, the app store just greased the wheels. Had Apple released the iPhone with a thumb keyboard or stylus it would have been just as successful (and boring) as every mobile device that had come before it.

So as I wait now for my iPad to arrive and I read all the articles for and against it I think most people focusing on battery life, flash support or built in capabilities are missing the point. The real innovation that will decide the iPad’s success will come down to  only one thing, the iPads user experience and how successfully it bridges the gap between humans and technology.

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The annoying marketing gone crazy technology looking for a problem award goes to 3D TV

This year it seems everyone was talking about 3D TV’s with CNet, Engadget and others all talking about 3D tv’s like they were the second coming of Christ. I’m not sure who’s good graces they were trying to get into but let me say what everyone else is secretly thinking: 3D TV’s are stupid. Despite the obviousness of this, it didn’t stop CES from announcing the Panasonic VT25 as “Best in Show“. It just doesn’t make sense to make everything we watch 3D. I don’t want to watch the evening news, Old School or any movie with Matthew McConaughey in 3D. Ever.

And then there are the glasses. If you don’t have glasses on, then you get a headache. Anyone who walks in the room while you are watching a 3D show is going to get insta-frustrated. Oh and you look like a total idiot. The only reason this works in a theater is because everyone looks like an idiot so everyone keeps their mouth shut.

No, no one is going to run out and buy a new TV for this unless they have money to burn. Here is the big secret however that no one wants you to know, every TV will soon be a 3D “capable” TV and if your TV can refresh faster than 96Hz already (ideally 120Hz), it might already be ready (the HDMI 1.4 requirement might be a hiccup). This feature is going to be thrown in for free by the end of the year and right now is just a marketing gimmick to justify the cost of higher end TV’s. I expect Vizio to be carrying 3D capable TV’s at Costco around the middle of the year for the same price you would pay today for a regular TV. Unless of course  the TV manufacturers try and create some sort of 3D hardware standards monopoly which is likely because that’s just what hardware companies do. For example everyone is pushing their “Full HD 3D” solution which requires shutter glasses vs. the cheap things you wore when you saw Avatar 3D at the IMAX theater last weekend.

The real winners here will likely end up being the content providers who will try and sell you 3D versions of movies you already have.

The totally pointless but yet I want one so bad award goes to the Parrot AR.Drone

You know something is going to be a success when people are already talking about all the scary things you can do with something and the Parrot AR.Drone has all kinds of awesome scary tricks. Like hovering outside your neighbors windows recording video all controlled by your iPhone scary. The moment you can equip these things with missiles is when I suspect the fun will come to an end but until then, I want one.  Unless this product ends up being somehow fatally flawed and not living up to the hype expect every kid on the planet to be begging their parents for one. Parents everywhere are going to be rushing out to get these things too because they all secretly want this thing as well.

The should have gotten more attention because it’s going to change our life award goes to the RCA Airnergy Power System

Two words: Wireless Power. The RCA Airnergy system sucks up WiFi signals and turns it into electrical current. Let me say that again. WiFi signals go in, power comes out. Despite making everyone suddenly get worried that the WiFi signals in their house are frying their brain (it doesn’t, chill out) the idea of wireless power has the potential to change our lives forever. Think about the sort of devices that become possible when you suddenly don’t have to worry about plugging them in or charging them. I suspect this product is only the beginning of  a whole series of new technologies that will branch out to absorb all kinds of energy and convert it to power. Despite the utter coolness and trans-formative nature of this technology it’s getting almost no attention right now. This either means it’s too good to be true or people just can’t believe it. Kudos to Engadget for also saying what was also on everyone else’s mind: The Airnergy gives RCA a reason to exist.

And the best of CES award goes to…

The product that is going to make the entire CES event seem like a distant and pointless memory, the upcoming Apple tablet. According to John Paczkowski over at AllThingsD the announcement is planned for January 27th 2010. I still stand by my predictions that I made back in August as well as my expectations that the new tablet will be called the Apple MacBook Touch.  Stay tuned!

Related articles by Zemanta

• RCA Airnergy promises usable power generated from Wi-Fi signals. Possible? (crunchgear.com)
• RCA’s Wifi “power harvester” (boingboing.net)
• ‘Airnergy’ promises charging over Wi-Fi (guardian.co.uk)
• Is RCA’s Airnergy Snake Oil? (ask.slashdot.org)
• Alt.CES: RCA’s Wi-Fi “Power Harvester” Snakeoil? (makezine.com)
• Charge your BlackBerry battery using Wi-Fi signal (bbgeeks.com)
• RCA Airnergy Charges Gadgets with Nothing But Wifi Signals [Chargers] (gizmodo.com)

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"I'll be happy to give you innovative thinking. What are the guidelines?"

When I was at HP a small group of the former SPI Dynamics team had the opportunity to speak with Ann Livermore and share our thoughts and experiences on life inside HP. The conversation was free flowing and unstructured and we spent way too much time complaining about how hard life was inside HP but it was a good conversation nevertheless. During the conversation the topic of innovation came up to which I said something to the effect that HP was spending an enormous amount of time and energy trying to foster innovation programs but very little to fund execution and remove overhead on daily tasks which lead me to state the simple truth: Innovation without execution is worthless.

All these companies focused on Innovation have it all wrong.

You know that old adage that says hire smart people and then get out of their way? When you enable execution, you are getting out of their way.

Several friends of mine go to work every day inside these “innovative” companies only to regularly spend 8 hours of their day on conference calls where no decisions are made and the time in between responding to e-mails. You know the feeling, we have all been there, you look and feel busy and you are rushing about but you never seem to get anything done.

The only way to truly foster innovation is to aggressively eliminate these barriers to execution everywhere you find them and continuously invest in optimizing your companies work flows (much in the same way that a good coder constantly re-factors their code). Otherwise no matter how many smart people you hire, you are failing to get out of their way and will not make the most of your smart people investment. Optimizing work flows so they stay out of the way can be a collective task that can be done by all in small companies but in large companies I propose that the task be handled by well funded teams that exist to do nothing but optimize processes and help the company get out of the way of their smart people. That team has to be empowered too, they can’t get stonewalled by the processes they are trying to eliminate or streamline.

So the next time you are asked to do something innovative or are trying to analyze the innovation potential of a project or company ask this simple question: Is there an equal investment in execution? Because without it chances are you will fail and your smart people will not be innovating, they will be just barely treading water, looking for the next ticket out of there.

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The four great axioms that govern all information technology innovation are processing speed, storage, connectivity and bandwidth with a fith super axiom, cost, that defines the innovation threshold for each of these axioms. If you trace every major technological advance back to its starting point you will find the threshold of one of these axioms reaching a new milestone and almost instantly creating critical mass for “the next big thing”. In many cases crossing one threshold creates pressure that forces innovation across the stack. Sometimes that innovation isn’t possible and ideas collapse back onto themselves unable to reach critical mass. In most cases these ideas don’t die however, they wait, already primed and ready and it’s these ideas that don’t just reach critical mass when their time comes, they supernova.

The Internet is the most obvious example of an innovation that has rapidly expanded only to have parts of it collapse back on itself when one of the the processing power, storage, connectivity or bandwidth axioms failed to materialize. Indeed the Internet itself only initially fulfilled one of the axioms – connectivity, it wasn’t until processing power, storage and bandwidth started to improve that things got really interesting.

It’s this constant expand, contract life-cycle that has created the environment for supernovas like the Web which spurned the need for improved processing and bandwidth which in turn gave the web it’s second supernova – Web 2.0.

But not all massive innovations are supernovas. The introduction of improved processing power and storage also gave rise to the era of Client-Server architectures, spurned the introduction of better connectivity and bandwidth solutions and changed the face of IT. But in those cases these improvements don’t really feel like supernovas but more like improvements on past ideas. Why?  It’s because the advent of client/server innovations were focused on business environments which is why the majority of the bandwidth and connectivity innovations have been business focused (gigabit network connectivity is common at work, but do you have gigabit at home to the Internet?)

Building Pressure

Over the past 15 years enormous amounts of energy has been invested in making the most of the bandwidth we have. Compression, caching, filtering, traffic shaping and routing technologies have all improved and been thrown at the problem to slow the inevitable need for more bandwidth. All of these technologies however have prevented real innovation and have likely created more problems than they have solved. Case in point I once participated in a conversation with Vint Cerf (who invented TCP/IP with Robert Kahn) where he lamented the priority they had given to saving bandwidth. He asked “How many problems for the Internet did we create because we wanted to save a few bytes?” Ironically Google has created a new initiative at code.google.com/speed/ that at times seems at odds with Vint’s question, but it’s clear at the very least Google is aware of how much this lack of bandwidth is crippling innovation.

Regardless, it’s this slow and methodical rise in bandwidth demand slowed by the attempts to save a few bytes but without a truly threshold breaking solution that has created a tremendous buildup of what I call “innovation pressure“. You can see this pressure when you observe the effect of things like the iPhone on AT&T’s 3G network, the effect that Cloud Computing services is having on both home and business networks alike and the tsunami that is online video that will likely destroy DVD, Blue-Ray and television broadcast media in a blink of the eye once released. These are however only a few examples.

Enter the Supernova

Now for some bold predictions (or at least hopes) on how it will play out. The next 12 months will see increased market awareness to the bandwidth problem followed by several high profile attempts by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco and others to address the issue head on in their own unique way. But these improvements won’t solve the last mile problem and will only buy time until the next phase of evolution arrives – Wireless Broadband.

The wireless providers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) will start rolling out 4G networks throughout the country with 100Mbits mobile to 1Gbits stationary transfer capabilities, this roll out will be marked by the first viable household wireless broadband devices. This roll-out will be awaken the telecom industry. Dark fiber long sitting dormant is going to start coming online to keep up with the increased demand, this is where companies like Cisco and Juniper are going to really clean up as demand for their hardware starts to return to late 90′s levels. Lets not forget the 700Mhz UHF spectrum that just got opened up with the end of analog TV broadcasts as well. I think how this all get’s used is a wild card right now but it will deffinitly keep the wireless bandwdith train moving.

All the while, as the bandwidth problems starts to crumble we will see an exponential move throughout the market to consume that bandwidth as Cloud Computing initiatives start to hit full swing and both business and consumer cloud computing initiatives take root. Consumer Online backup was just the beginning, the gaming industry will start to offload game play and graphics processing, business will start to shift some of their massive transactional load into the cloud, and that’s when we reach critical mass. The fall of the bandwidth problem will unlock immediate global scale improvements in processing power and storage. The last hurdle that will check this runaway explosion is connectivity which I think will likely still be working out some kinks, but more limiting is that it’s going to take time to see the human side of the connectivity problem get solved. Once we see close to 80% of the United States get online you can expect to see the next supernova emerge.

Challenges for the Future

I’ll end by laying out a few challenges that I think this future is going to bring with it. These challenges can become opportunities if someone plays their cards right:

1) Security: What does security even mean anymore? Cloud Computing will bring with it the final death knell of the network perimeter. With no cool security toys to play with company Information security teams will have get back to their roots of ensuring Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability and focus less on tools (controls) and more on process otherwise why even keep them around?

2) Privacy: If your data is not local anymore where is it and who has access to it? What happens in the legal realm? If the legal system doesn’t evolve it’s sense of personal property to include data and capabilities that exist in the cloud then the ideal that you are protected from unlawful search and seizure is effectively dead. What about borders, there are a lot of legal systems to contend with. But wait, it gets worse. Many providers already limit what you can do with their services (no SPAM, no porn, etc…) but what happens when they start to limit what we compute? Will governments step in and try and monitor for anyone simulating nuclear explosions for example? With computing done remotely in the future, it’s not just your data you need to worry about but what are you computing with it. Thought Crimes anyone? Your data and the things you do with it including information about you needs to become your personal property no matter where it’s kept.

3) Interoperability: It won’t be in a providers best interest to make it easy for you to switch but without the ability to switch things will stagnate and cloud monopolies will inevitably form. A dangerous sign already is that the open source community has concluded it won’t be able to play a significant role in cloud computing other than creating free software for the providers because ultimately it costs big bucks to run a data center.  It will be hard for providers to make the leap to realize they need to be open. I’m not a fan of regulation but regulation is necessary when market forces will never push the market to do the right thing…this one is a tough one. The Jericho forum I think has the best chance to advance this agenda, if you are on the consumer side of things, you should give them your support.

4) Business Continuity: If your entire business is dependent on the cloud, what happens when the cloud lets you down? Truthfully this one will solve itself and I think it’s just the last of the old IT guard fighting change. People don’t need to get to your IT data center, they need to get to your data and applications, when you put them in the cloud, you move them closer to the consumer. However what happens when you are the primary consumer? Having your Internet connection go down could kill you. It’s all about bandwidth and connectivity at this point and these issues get worked out during the supernova but there will be some spectacular disasters along the way I’m sure.

What do you think will be the next technology supernova?

++Erik

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