I was a hippie. I guess that I still am one, deep down. I am proud to admit it. I had hair down to the middle of my back, listened to some very weird music and sat around talking about ‘the guru’ and ‘peace’ and ‘the war’. Sadly, at least to my teenage mind, the sexual revolution had already been overthrown.
CDs didn’t exist. We had 8 track tapes. DVDs, even VCRs, didn’t exist. We had TVs and movie theatres. Cell phones didn’t exist. We used the house phone. Calculators were brand new and cost a weeks pay. We used a slide ruler in engineering class. Computers were massive machines the size of a house. We wrote our notes on paper and typed our reports on typewriters.
I saw my friends every day. I talked to them; I could physically touch them. My friends that had moved away could have been on another planet. Using the phone was an expensive privilege. Long distance calls would cost an hours pay for every minute you talked. We wrote letters. On paper. With envelopes and stamps. Long distance relationships rarely, if ever, survived.
As I grew older, both in years and experience, the world grew with me. It expanded. It accelerated. Technology continued to explode.
I was one of the first people in the world to connect from home. It was in 1977. I paid $120 a month. That’s like $2000 a month now. ATT called it a ‘dedicated data line’. It was fast. A screaming 300 baud dial up line. That is about 30 characters per second. Characters. One more time, characters. I could work from home.
My first PC had 128K bytes. Not Gig. Not Meg. K bytes. It had a floppy drive. Small hard disk drives didn’t exist yet. A 10Meg drive weighed 120 pounds and was the size of a one drawer filing cabinet. Lights would dim when you accessed a file.
The world wide web was born without any content. It just connected you. It wasn’t the Internet yet. It was expensive to hook up to the web. It was slow. We did email. A lot of email. But only to business people. Consumers played games on their computers. Phone calls were a little cheaper because of satellites. We had to talk slow. VCRs were for recording TV and not much else.
The Internet allowed us to do more than email. But not a lot more. We still wrote letters on paper. We still printed everything. We still talked slow on the phone.
The bubble came. The new economy. Companies didn’t need to have a business plan or a product. They just needed customers. Internet users. Billions were made. The bubble popped. Phone calls were still expensive.
Cell phones were big and clunky. They were called ‘portable phones’, not cell phones. They cost a lot. We used pagers. We ran for a pay phone when beeped. We used quarters.
And then something amazing happened. 16 Gigabytes in a memory stick. Digital cameras with a quality like the Hubble Space Telescope. Cell phones with hundreds of features. Ipods the size of a quarter. Touch screens. Huge TVs 1” thick. Computers for $2K that could outcompute all the computers in existence in 1978.
A magic year. 1978. Millennials are people born after 1978.
The Millennials are the first inherently mobile, digital natives. They grew up with technology so powerful, that it can do whatever is needed. Machines so fast, they can do any job. Devices so small, they can go anywhere. Digital content so pure that you want to pick it up and feel it. The Internet connected the Millennials. The websites tied them together in social groups. The phone companies worried. The phone companies changed their names to service providers, thinking that would help.
A Millennial’s best friend is most likely someone they have never met (at least physically), who lives in another place (another planet?) and is a young (old?) man (woman?) who is just like them. They don’t talk, they text. They are immersed in technology. Immersed in communications. Immersed in content. In response, service providers offered free long distance.
This is just the tip of the ever-changing Millennial communication iceberg. The Millennials are so different from previous generations that they don’t fit the old communications model at all. Charging for minutes won’t work.. Charging for sessions won’t work. Charging for messages won’t work. Charging for services won’t work. How do you make money?
Service providers have become commoditized. Transport is a commodity. Services are a commodity. Talking, viewing, downloading are all commodities. Device features are a commodity.
Service providers must create a flexible, high performance network environment that can support consumer and market evolution measured in weeks instead of years. Networks must provide full convergence. Not just of devices or services, but of lifestyles.
Convergence of lifestyle information, lifestyle content, and lifestyle activities can never be a commodity.
I like Millennials.
Let’s make money.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
The Great Equalizer
As you read this you can see my picture off to the side of this posting. You might see me as a healthy, white, male American business man. But am I really? Perhaps I am blind and I used an audio interface to create this posting. Or maybe I am a convicted felon trying to start a new life even before my release. Maybe, I am an octogenarian woman that was raised to be silent to the world around me and am now trying to find myself even as time marches on. I could be a teenaged orphan among many others located in a village in Africa with a generator as the only power source?
Horace Mann said “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”. He strove for an equal education for children of all diversities. He fought agressively to create a standardized education system, provided by the government for all. He stated: “A house without books is like a room without windows.
No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.”
Earlier this year (January 2009) the number of Internet users worldwide surpassed one billion. People are not just playing games or sending business reports. They are interacting. They are studying. They are sharing. They are learning. And they are doing so at a pace and a volume that is difficult to comprehend.
The Internet provides access to information in ways that could never have been dreamed of before. People in the farthest, most remote locations on Earth can still access the Internet and can access virtually any information located anywhere on the planet.
Thomas Huxley wrote “The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.” If Huxley were alive today, I think he would extrapolate even further about the potential of the modern virtual university. It is a place of diverse peoples in distant lands. It can educate in multiple languages simultaneously and share information that was previously only available to specialists and scholars. It is a factory not only of knowledge, but of culture and society itself.
Albert Einstein spent years working out mathmatical problems that had already been solved over 50 years before his research. The rarity of books and the problems of language translations made it almost impossible for even a leading scientist and scholar to know of the works of talented people before them. The Internet has changed that.
If I want to write a book on the battles of the Civil War, I can reference materials over the Internet today that were unavailable in the past. I could produce a work just as scholarly as many professors.
Publishing a book is no longer just for the priviliged or the lucky or the rich. Websites like www.lulu.com make it easy and affordable for anyone, anywhere to publish a book on any subject with on demand printing and distribution provided through the Internet.
Starting a business no longer requires a loan from the bank or a storefront on Ninth Street. For less than $50 a month anyone, anywhere can create a web based storefront and sell their products and wares.
First graders have homework that REQUIRES using the Internet. Those without the ability to access the Internet will have an even harder time competing than previous generations before the Internet. It is no longer a matter of getting a book at school in order to remain competitive. It is now a matter of accessing the libraries of the world at a fingertip.
Yes, there are one billion people on the Internet. What about the other almost five billion? Even in the US, a majority of the population does not have high speed Internet access.
The Internet and the new cyber economy that is flourishing across it make no requirements or distinction concerning age, sex, race, ethnic background, religion, wealth or any other categories that previously limited access and competitiveness for new opportunities.
It is time for the great equalizer of the 21st century, the Internet and all its riches, to be made available to all.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
Horace Mann said “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”. He strove for an equal education for children of all diversities. He fought agressively to create a standardized education system, provided by the government for all. He stated: “A house without books is like a room without windows.
No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.”
Earlier this year (January 2009) the number of Internet users worldwide surpassed one billion. People are not just playing games or sending business reports. They are interacting. They are studying. They are sharing. They are learning. And they are doing so at a pace and a volume that is difficult to comprehend.
The Internet provides access to information in ways that could never have been dreamed of before. People in the farthest, most remote locations on Earth can still access the Internet and can access virtually any information located anywhere on the planet.
Thomas Huxley wrote “The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.” If Huxley were alive today, I think he would extrapolate even further about the potential of the modern virtual university. It is a place of diverse peoples in distant lands. It can educate in multiple languages simultaneously and share information that was previously only available to specialists and scholars. It is a factory not only of knowledge, but of culture and society itself.
Albert Einstein spent years working out mathmatical problems that had already been solved over 50 years before his research. The rarity of books and the problems of language translations made it almost impossible for even a leading scientist and scholar to know of the works of talented people before them. The Internet has changed that.
If I want to write a book on the battles of the Civil War, I can reference materials over the Internet today that were unavailable in the past. I could produce a work just as scholarly as many professors.
Publishing a book is no longer just for the priviliged or the lucky or the rich. Websites like www.lulu.com make it easy and affordable for anyone, anywhere to publish a book on any subject with on demand printing and distribution provided through the Internet.
Starting a business no longer requires a loan from the bank or a storefront on Ninth Street. For less than $50 a month anyone, anywhere can create a web based storefront and sell their products and wares.
First graders have homework that REQUIRES using the Internet. Those without the ability to access the Internet will have an even harder time competing than previous generations before the Internet. It is no longer a matter of getting a book at school in order to remain competitive. It is now a matter of accessing the libraries of the world at a fingertip.
Yes, there are one billion people on the Internet. What about the other almost five billion? Even in the US, a majority of the population does not have high speed Internet access.
The Internet and the new cyber economy that is flourishing across it make no requirements or distinction concerning age, sex, race, ethnic background, religion, wealth or any other categories that previously limited access and competitiveness for new opportunities.
It is time for the great equalizer of the 21st century, the Internet and all its riches, to be made available to all.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
