News From the Year 2022

A friend sent in an email message recently:

"... today we woke to find that AAPL market cap.was greater than both that of MSFT and GOOG ..."

Given what Apple has done in the past ten years this is right on target.

I've been impressed with Apple for a long time.  This email is being composed on a Macbook Pro, Evelyn uses and iPad and between the two of us we have 5 iPODs (one of the three iPods I have is the Ipod WIFI which is basically a hand held computer).  Evelyn also has a Macbook air and our family has an iMac 24 that we use when we need a larger screen.

I do note that Microsoft announced recently that the Windows8 OS is now up and running on the ARM core.  

Now on to 2022 ...

I think this development from Microsoft (along with the Google tablet/smart-phone OS) means that we will see in the next few years an explosion of tablets, and other devices, like we have only imagined in the past.  

This explosion will result in the tablet becoming so ubiquitous that they will no longer 'belong' to to a particular person (not my tablet or my wife's tablet but our set of tablets, or our home's set of tablets) ... 

When you 'pick-one-up' it will "belong" to you as long as you are using it and when you set it down it goes back to being 'anyones'.  You impress your content/style-of-use on the device by pointing it to some cloud store that contains your preferences (roaming profile) by perhaps touching it with a fob that you carry with  you or perhaps it can read your finger print and you literally just touch it.

All this will result in a profound shift in how we view and use computing devices.  Your digital-identity will be something that you impress on the things around you, your car, your phone, various tablets/keyboard-devices.  

The distinctions between a television/telephone/computer/music-video-player will will just fade away.  Whenever you are near one of these things it will 'belong' to you in that all your 'content' will be available from it without having to worry about shifting it around manually.

As far as paying for all of it you will 'pay-by-the-bit' for content sent or received.  If you need synchronous voice/video/text rather than asynchronous then you pay more.  If you can 'wait-for-it' whether it is communications or content then you pay less.  I think this will result in people naturally moving toward asynchronous use modes.   

In ten years we will be as far beyond where we are now as we are beyond where we were 20 years ago. (2022).