I had a rough childhood. I grew up in an era where you listened to cassette tapes in the car and waited 5 minutes for them to change sides (if you were lucky enough to have an automatic flipper). I also lived through the days of VHS rentals: “Please be sure and rewind.” Probably the most trying years were back when we had CRT monitors, TV’s the size of a recliner, and no HD Discovery channel!
I’ve come a long way. Now instead of a clunky Walkman I can pick me up a nifty iPod touch. Instead of a clunky bag phone I can sport my new Droid! Better yet I can surf the web via Google Chrome instead of IE6. Life is good.
But what about my future? It can’t be too bad if in my lifetime we have traded the Dewey Decimal System for Google! The Internet has probably been one of if not the most revolutionary inventions of my lifetime (no thanks to Al Gore). Even in my lifetime the Internet has progressed greatly. It seems to me the Internet is taking two routes. You have the Apple approach and the Google approach.
Apple Approach: use Apps to run on their Mac products. You simply download the free (or cheap) App to your device and you can interface with Facebook, Twitter, or compete against others in classic games like Paper Toss. You basically run software (App) on your device that interfaces with the internet so you don’t need a standard browser to use the Internet. You live in a world of Apps.
Google Approach: use their Chrome OS to run your whole computer. In other words do everything from the internet (cloud computing). When you turn on your computer it would basically load your web browser (Google Chrome of course) and you could do everything online. Your software turns into the Internet. You live in a web browser (although Apps are not mutually exclusive to the Google approach).
Which one is better? Which one will chart the course of human history? Who will have kids looking back and saying, “Remember when we had to use ….” Who knows – maybe a completely new way of using the Internet will come to use?
Until then I’m going to make me some instant Mac ‘n’ Cheese – bet you didn’t see that invention coming, did ya mom?
