THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

Okay, so we’ve had some internal (and client) comment on Today is the Day the PC Died. Here’s an example: "Okay. So let’s suppose you’re right, and the PC really is on the downslope. What does this mean to me, beyond ‘Thou shalt go and develop a iPhone app, pronto-ish?’"

Fair enough. What does it mean–to everyone, and to marketers in general?

Well, first, the more I think about it, the more this really is a watershed event. This marks the first step in making technology part of ourselves. And that changes everything.

Follow me for a sec.

Think of how you use your computer today. You sit down, shake the mouse, open the web browser and go to YouTube. Or you use Office to make a presentation. Or you go on Facebook to see what your friends are doing. Then, when you’re done, you stand up and walk away from the computer.

Or, if you have a laptop, you drag it out of your messenger bag, plug it into the wall, open the lid and wait for it to find the wireless connection, then do your YouTube/Facebook/Office/Final Cut/Flash/whatever. And when you’re done, you close the lid, put it to sleep, and stuff it away in your messenger bag.

In both cases, you separate yourself from the computer.

In an iPhone-esque world, your computer is in your pocket, it’s always a half-second away from being turned on, and it has many different ways to alert you to its presence. The computer has become part of you. And when you add highly capable apps for productivity and games, as well as higher-speed data, you now have a constantly-connected, intelligent, extremely high-functioning link to, well, damn near anything in the world.

It’s now trivial to look up information on Google, play games with friends, communicate with voice and photos and video, add metainformation to the growing geographic and regional databases, respond to email, create new spreadsheets–half a million things are now seamlessly integrated with your life, rather than being a car trip or a laptop-startup away.

I’ll repeat: the computer has become part of you.

Let’s extrapolate this out. iPhone-esque technology becomes smaller, faster, more ubiquitous. At the same time, future display technology allows us to project data into our eyes, creating overlays on the real world. And, at this point, the distinctions between our own capabilities and those of the network begin to blur. We’re constantly connected. There’s no reason not to use your Google Ambient account. And, in fact, unless you turn it off, it’ll probably work constantly and helpfully in the background, instantly recognizing objects and classes of objects (like cars, faces, friends, and more) to let you know what’s going on with them.

"Wow, that’s a lot of information," the dinosaurs here say. "And I can see the potential for spam and abuse."

Yeah, and welcome to the early 21st century. Yes, assimilating augmented reality overlays may represent an order of magnitude increase in the amount of information we have to process. But that’s what today’s millennials (and post-millenials) have been training themselves for. Watching TV while doing homework, listening to music, and talking to 3 friends via IM is a great start on managing information overload. They’ll treat these augmented realities as part of themselves in very short order.

And for marketers, that presents an interesting conundrum. How do you market in an environment where computers have become part of everyone, and media itself has become personalized? People tend to guard their personal environment with much greater care than, say, a web page. AdSense ads won’t be tolerated when they’re in your field of vision, or even if they’re flittering around the corner of your eye. 3D overlays of fantasy-lands to explore in real space may be a better marketing venue.

But, no matter how you look at it, the rules are changing. Fast. What are you doing to keep ahead?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.