More mystery than puzzle…

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot in the past few weeks about a concept that I picked up on from a Malcolm Gladwell essay that I read last year… the distinction between mysteries and puzzles. The short summary is that a puzzle is something that had an unknown but fixed solution, whereas a mystery will only be solved by a level of interaction (and whilst analysis of a puzzle helps you narrow down possibilities, it tends to just confuse things for mysteries).

It strikes me that much of what the IT industry faces at the moment falls into the category of mysteries, but the industry is so geared to solving puzzles (read: problem/solution) that it is struggling to know how to adapt. There were predictions this week that 15% of “PCs” sold this year will be iPads… that is, if our turns out to be true, a remarkably fast rise to significant market share (and think how few companies in any consumer category go from zero to 11%  share in 18 months with a single product with only 3 variants).

Whilst I have heard Michael Dell speak of how the PC is far from dead, and JP Rangaswami argue that it is already dead and we just haven’t noticed yet, the only conclusion I can draw as yet is that it is a mystery that nobody knows the answer to, and that the answers will emerge over the next few years as a result of what the manufacturers, software developers and consumers do in that timeframe.

It’s an exciting time. In the way that, I imagine, skydiving if you didn’t necessarily know if you had a parachute on your back would be exciting …