It's amazing how technology makes every other experience transient and itself redundant in quick cycles.
A bigflix subscription for movies kept me enthralled for months on end last year, but with digital cable and its 8 english movie channels and 12 hindi movie channels, I have been forced to keep the bigflix order book dormant and avoid responding to all their reminders.
Take my iphone, for instance. It has made a whole host of devices quite redundant. The iphone apps are making everything else unnecessary- check this- it's already a video camera, has my stock portfolio, facebook, news videos, atlas, global weather finder, scientific calculator, fav gaming device- sudoku, chess,checkers and pacman, live tv, ipod, quick notepad, money manager, birthday reminder and has all my mailboxes and contact lists.
That's not all, what it has also done is turned business models upside down.
Microsoft doesn't care for the hardware, just makes the software and leaves many vendors fighting each other for customers., while it just sits around making proprietary software.
Apple turned the model around, it makes the basic hardware- focussing on designing an intuitive product - say an iphone or ipod or ipad and lets everyone make software for it. So over a 100,000 app companies have mushroomed around it. That's why it is iconic.
From CRT to LCD to Plasma to LED, we have transitioned in 3-4 remarkable years.
To design is to be on top of teh value chain.
Everything else can be sub-contracted and take shape by itself.
Now take blogging. With facebook, and then with twitter, blogging is been made old-fashioned before you can say b!
Thoughts have to fit 140 character word limits.
Technology has turned time transient.
