June 15, 2006

From little seeds do great ideas grow

True or false? You decide.

There will be three desktop clients through which you conduct your life. Browser wars (“Episode 1” … or was that 4?) was only the beginning.

  • The browser. “Their stuff” — your lens on the outside world — discover, read, and transact.
  • The messenger. “Our stuff” — your lens into your social world — connect and converse.
  • The manager. “My stuff” — your lens onto your own digital artifacts — search, edit and view.

Skype is/was the “new Netscape”. Perhaps a few billion dollars was cheap…

Having played with Nokia Lifeblog 2.0 for a while, I think this is kind of a transformative moment for how we interact with the last category. It’s still at the Mosaic-like stage of development (go read your browser wars history), but it’s useable. I look forward to the Windows Explorer paradigm going the way of MS-DOS.

No time to blog further on this one. Time to let the idea stew and simmer.

Posted by Martin Geddes at 05:25 PM
Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/744.

Comments

I like this idea a lot. Your 'Skype is/was the new Netscape' comment made me wonder if there is potential for further convergence - ie browser and messenger becoming one entity.

Illustration - you go to an online store, call the shopkeeper from within the same environment, ask a question about a product (Skype us now!), then make a purchase.

You'd still need the manager to stay separate, though. You don't want the shopkeeper seeing what's in your pockets.

Posted by: at June 15, 2006 07:35 PM

Hi Martin

Thought provoking post - it has a resonance with Marshall McLuhan's 'medium is the massage' - 'all media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical' - browser for eyes, messenger for voice and manager for ears.

Last month I visited several of the well known Silicon Valley Internet companies one of the common themes was 'beyond the browser'. Perhaps we should extend this thinking to beyond the desktop (is the desktop metaphor broken as it was conceived at a time when we worked in offices and sat at desks?). This would be a good theme explore more on Telco 2.0.

Cheers

Philip

Posted by: at June 15, 2006 11:28 PM
Please enter your comment below. Your comment will not appear immediately -- they all go for pre-approval by me because of the volume of spam I receive.







Remember personal info?