Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg thinks technology innovation will slow down but not stop
Wall Street Journal personal technology columnist, Walt Mossberg, gave the luncheon keynote speech here at the Dow Jones Technology Showcase conference. Here’s an edited of Mossberg’s talk.
We’re in an Econoclypse
It’s obvious to everybody that we are in for a serious recession. The question is only how serious. We are in kind of an econoclypse (economy+apocalypse).
But technology innovation just don’t stop
I have been writing about tech for 17 years and it’s been my observation that when things do slow down in bad times they don’t stop. There is a digital tidal wave in the world… It slows down a little but it doesn’t stop.
And the companies that can hold together and continue to work on their innovation, business model and especially product innovation, those are the companies that come out of these things strongest.
And even if you don’t manage to do that, somebody else will.
Windows 7 is promising!
We have a new version of Windows coming which I actually think has a chance to be quite good. And quite good was not a phrase you will see in any of my columns next to the word Vista. But I think the track they are on with Windows 7 is quite promising.
It looks a lot the mid to late 80s and the mid to late 90s at the same time!
It reminds me a little bit of the mid to late 90s because we have another wave of internet innovation going on. And there are 2 exciting categories that I see.
- One is outside the browser. These widgets, Web Apps whatever you want to call them [like Apple Dashboard or Vista Sidebar]. But really the place where I think it will flourish is on handheld computers, on iPhone class of phones [where you will use an "App" instead of the browser]. There’s 7,000 Apps for the iPhone since the 11th of July or over 200 million downloads;
- The other one is trying to take what has been true in corporate America for a long time which is the services in the cloud, wether its the Blackberry enterprise server or Microsoft Exchange or Lotus that replicate data across devices and push email and other data and bring that to the wider consumer world. You see Google, Microsoft, Apple making some effort there.
Complementing that, and that what makes me think of the late and mid 80s where the mass market personal computer appeared in 1977 and had 3 of them; and one of the most important of the 3 was the Apple II, but you also had a Radio Shack and a Commodore.
And those were the first machines where somebody without an engineering degree could actually do something with it. And on the Apple II in particular that’s where businesses began to adopt personal computers [with applications like the Visicalc spreadsheet].
But it was in the mid 80s that you began to see this tremendous competition and intellectual/design/engineering activity around what is a personal computer. And I think we are kind of back there because there are new form factors and models of computers. Some of them are these netbooks. The much bigger category of new kind of computers is what I call handheld computers, another term might be super smartphones [like the iPhone, G1 and the Blackberry Storm].
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