Most of the computer world is based upon inventions and choices between 1964 and 1978: the mouse, networking, UNIX, the C programming language, personal computers, the floppy drive, the spreadsheet, the word-processor and the SQL database.
When people think computers, they think of a mouse, being networked (via the internet), thumb drives (the successor to the floppy), spreadsheets and word processors. When people are online (websites, email, twitter and so on), what makes it happen is usually written on languages that are descendants of C, store stuff in SQL databasess and so on.
That’s grown to the point where there were more things on the Internet than people on the planet in 2008 (http://gigaom.com/2011/07/17/the-internet-of-things-infographic/). But, the 1960’s and 1970’s when all these fundamental bits and pieces were developed was very different. The Internet began in the US as a DARPA project. In 1970, DARPA achieved a major milestone: they built a network with four computers. Four.
In 1982, as that era ended, Tron, was a landmark movie, with one of the first extensive uses of computer animation. The marketing team made serious hay with the fact that rendering was done, in part, on a leased Cray 1 supercomputer.
Today’s phones are more powerful than the best computer in the world when Tron was made. Many Americans have a phone like that, a tablet, a laptop and maybe something hooked up to the TV to watch movies or play games over the internet; as many devices as existed on the largest DARPA’s entire network in 1970. And, one estimate is that, by 2015, the internet will move the equivalent of every movie ever made… every five minutes.
The 1960’s and 1970’s defined today’s world of technology. And, what defined that era were limits. Computers were very expensive, big, slow, couldn’t hold much and barely talked to each other. Using computers was really a process of radically simplifying things, breaking them down and apart into chewable chunks. Almost literally mouthfuls. 80 Characters, 80 letters/numbers/spaces was a very common limit: enough for ten or a dozen words, one sentence, one mouthful. Storing one simple order meant breaking it up and putting in five or more places depending on whether it was the general order, shipping or payment info, the items bought and so on. Otherwise, the systems couldn’t get the job done.
It’s as if FedEx did shipping by what their employees could hold with their hands closed. Want to ship a plate to your aunt? Shatter it, send along instructions to glue it back together and your aunt will hire a couple of people to glue it all back together and fill the cracks.
Shattering a plate might make it fit. It doesn’t make it better. The technology we’re using is built on assumptions from a world that was defined by what you couldn’t do. Those limits are gone.
Part of we’ve been doing is tearing up those assumptions. There’s no reason to shatter plates anymore so we keep things together as something we call eDings. An order is one thing and it “knows” how to do what needs to be done. We’ve built up from there (ECT). If eDings, things, orders “know” how to do things, what if you could talk to them in English. If you can talk to them in English, they could talk to each other and you in English, asking questions to find out what they don’t know. When you realized the old rules no longer apply, the world becomes very different and amazing things become possible.