It's the end of the decade in a year and a bit, but as we all seem happier dealing with the patterns numbers make rather than mathematical precision, here are a few of my thoughts about the ten years that have just passed (the decade with the slightly embarassing name)…
The decade when the internet became ubiquitous (if you are rich)
In 2000, broadband was reasonably available, not particularly broad (half a meg) and from memory about thirty pounds a month. Ten years later and I'm paying a fifth of the money for 16 times the bandwidth. But that is hardly Moore's Law rates of capacity improvement.
In the UK we are held back by a nineteenth century infrastructure (copper), the mess that was the implementation of cable tv in the 80s and 90s, and our peculiar attachment to individual dwellings. Proper ethernet is easy to run into apartment blocks, but an expensive and time consuming exercise to houses.
However, and this is the thing that we all need to remember (especially anyone who works in digital media)… only around 2/3 of households in the UK have internet access. And the UK, despite the best efforts of Fred Goodwin and co., is still one of the richest economies in the world.
The decade when we went mobile…
The solution to some of those issues about ubiquity of access might be answered by the explosion of mobile phone usage in the past ten years. The average Brit at the beginning of the year had 37 mobile phones in their sock drawer until the likes of Mazuma Mobile started advertising heavily.
The mobile phone is increasingly a portal onto the web. Apple changed the rules with the iPhone, and the rest of the industry is now starting to catch up. Looking ahead it's going to be fascinating to see how much mobile devices are going to evolve in the next ten years.
The decade the music industry changed
Apple, again… The iPod, and more importantly, iTunes, made a dramatic change in the nature of the music business.
An ex-music industry exec sat me down at the beginning of the decade and explained the then industry to me. Record companies worked as investment capital providers. Signing a band they would make and investment, essentially a punt on the future success of the artist. For every Elton John, Michael Jackson or Cheryl Cole, there are dozens of Brilliant Corners or Jazz Butchers who never really make any money for the labels. However, the music industry had come up with a genius wheeze… The various artists compilation; or, the flogging of cheap old stuff at a premium.
When the internet (and specifically, MP3) came along, the record industry was caught on the back foot. Unable to decide whether it was merely a piracy platform, or just another new channel to market (like CD, cassette, eight track and vinyl before it), Apple was able to produce desirable consumer electronics products allied to a powerful distribution engine and, in a matter of a few years, take over a substantial piece of the market.
The future, however, could lie elsewhere. As I write this I am listening to yet another album on Spotify mobile…
The decade we got all social (2.0)
Music was also influential in the explosion of social networking that happened in the latter half of the decade. MySpace was one of the first big names of Web 2.0.
There's a lot of competition in the social networking arena, and huge volumes of bullshit as well. My single biggest area of concern is that an industry (software, IT etc) so stereotypically populated by people with such low social and interpersonal skills defining how we should all communicate with each other is deeply scary. Just look at how 'successful' email has been…
The decade we didn't upgrade Windows
There's an ongoing debate at work about how the Apple Mac OS look and feel is so much better than that of Windows. The thing is, it's not really a fair comparison. Whilst most of the Macs in the firm are running an operating system launched about a year ago, because of Apple's forced upgrade paths that come from having OS & Hardware so tightly coupled, our PCs are running a near-nine-year-old OS, Windows XP. Comparing that against OS 9 might be fairer.
The noughties were remarkable in that so few businesses moved their core operating systems for PCs beyond XP. Windows 7 looks like a good product, but people are so unused to doing major OS upgrades these days, it will be interesting to see how many people make the switch soon.
The decade the clouds appeared…
Something I've spoken about at length in these pages, the decade has seen the commercial blossoming of the concepts of cloud computing, software as a service, and utility computing.
The teens (jeez- another embarassingly-named decade to get through) will see cloud take over, and that's something that I'm staking my career on as in the spring of 2010 my company will be Going Google.
So there you go. My threepence-worth of idle tittle-tattle….
mmitII 