I’m surprised more people didn’t anticipate this year’s tech wreck.
Once computing mastered video, as it did early in the last decade, there were no obvious new horizons. What resulted was crap without application. Crypto has no application. The metaverse has no application.
Without new files to deal with, this year is featuring a shakeout in how to deal with them. PCs were already being hurt by Chromebooks, which move most workloads to the cloud. PCs even accepted it. Most of my own PC’s files are now cloud-based.
But what I didn’t anticipate (and should have) was the death of writing.
What makes TikTok compelling isn’t that you can watch and interact with one on a phone. It’s that you can create content it entirely on a phone.
TikTok lacks a keyboard.
This is going to become a trend. There’s now a dictation command in Microsoft Word, so I could write this without a keyboard. The ability of video interfaces like TikTok will only grow, leading to longer and deeper formats created without keyboards.
Some people write about cursive becoming a lost art. Typing may soon follow it.
Remember what the Mac and Windows turned the PC into, a screen with a mouse-and-keyboard interface. Smartphones replace mice with fingers and make the keyboard almost vestigial. It took a few years, but most people have gotten used to it.
The result is keyboard-less content. Entire careers are now untouched by human hands, at least hands engaged in the physical act of writing. This is bad for publishers, bad for bloggers. We’re becoming a video society. Who needs to read?
A lot of digital ink is going to be spilled crying over this. That doesn’t interest me. What does interest me is what this means for the tech industry, and where to invest to take advantage of the changes.
I still say it’s in the Machine Internet. But it’s also increasingly clear that the Machine Internet is a systems business. There are a lot of moving parts that must be coordinated for applications to be practical. Security must be transparent. It must be trusted. Until we have that, the next boom can’t take off.
If I am pressed for an investment leading to the next boom, as the cloud led to the last one, it will be in machine-to-machine security.
