Reflecting on 10 years of jaw-dropping shifts

The last decade has brought a sweeping switch from tape and paper storage to digital downloads

They smile, they pour libations, they raise their glasses. Yes, that’s right — it’s the 10th anniversary of this column in ‘The Times’! As tech decades go, this one has been a jaw-dropper. Since my first column in 2000, the tech world has not so much blossomed as exploded.

Think of all the commonplace tech that didn’t even exist 10 years ago: HDTV, Blu-ray, GPS, Wi-Fi, Gmail, YouTube, iPod, iPhone, Kindle, Xbox, Wii, Facebook, Twitter, Android, online music stores, streaming movies and on and on.

With the turkey cooking, this seems like a good moment to review, to reminisce — and to distil some insight from the first decade in the new tech millennium.

Things don’t replace things; they just splinter: I can’t tell you how exhausting it is to keep hearing pundits say that some product is the ‘iPhone killer’ or the ‘Kindle killer.’ Listen, dudes: The history of consumer tech is branching, not replacing.

TV was supposed to kill radio. The DVD was supposed to kill the Cineplex. Instant coffee was supposed to replace fresh-brewed.

But here’s the thing: It never happens. You want to know what the future holds? OK, here you go: There will be both iPhones and Android phones. There will be both satellite radio and AM/FM. There will be both printed books and e-books. Things don’t replace things; they just add on.

Sooner or later, everything goes on-demand. The last 10 years has brought a sweeping switch from tape and paper storage to digital downloads. Music, TV shows, movies, photos and now books and newspapers. We want instant access. We want it easy.

Some people’s gadgets determine their self-esteem: Being a tech columnist is like being onstage: Feedback from readers is instantaneous, impassioned and voluminous.
Everybody reads with a lens: Some of the cultural wars in this country are deep-rooted, eternal and irresolvable. Gun control. Abortion. Justin Bieber.

But feelings run just as strongly in the tech realm. You can’t use the word ‘Apple’, ‘Microsoft’ or ‘Google’ in a sentence these days without stirring up emotion.

When I reviewed the iPad, I tried something radical: I wrote two separate reviews, of equal length, in the same column. One was negative, one was positive. My point was that you could view this machine very differently depending on your technical background.

But on blogs and in e-mail, anti-Apple readers wrote about the ‘love letter’ I’d written to the iPad; the Apple fanboys got riled up about the way I’d ‘trashed’ it. Incredibly, each side completely ignored the other half of the review.

It’s not that hard to tell the winners from the losers. The best part of this job is stumbling across some obscure product that’s truly great — and helping bring it to the public’s attention. (Some examples: GrandCentral, Readability, Line2, the Canon S95, LightScoop, OpenDNS.) I’ll admit it: I get a secret thrill from learning that some little company’s servers have been crashed by the Pogue Effect.

But the truth is, telling the winners from the losers usually isn’t very difficult. Anyone could do it. And some of the flops were colossal.

There was the Microsoft Spot Watch (2003). This was a wireless wristwatch that could display your appointments and messages — but cost $10 a month, had to be recharged nightly and wouldn’t work outside your home city unless you filled out a web form in advance.

Or the Akimbo (2005), a set-top box that gave you instant access to any TV show — any, that is, in its microscopic catalogue. Your choices included AdvenTV, “the first on-demand Turkish station in the US,” Veg TV (‘vegetarian cooking instruction’) and Skyworks, “helicopter flights over the most spectacular landscapes of Britain.”

Incredibly, nobody within a company ever seems to point out that the emperor is about to hit the market without clothes.

Some concepts’ time may never come: The same ‘breakthrough’ ideas keep surfacing — and bombing, year after year.

For the love of Mike, people, nobody wants videophones! When we’re on the phone, we don’t want to have to be presentable. We want to put away dishes, roll our eyes at other people in the room, pick our noses.

Sure, when we want to see the new baby, we’ll use Skype or FaceTime. But not for everyday calls. If you try to sell us a special phone that has a camera and screen, you will fail.

Teenagers do not want ‘communicators’ that do nothing but send text messages, either (AT&T Ogo, Sony Mylo, Motorola V200). People do not want to surf the internet on their TV screens (WebTV, AOLTV, Google TV).

And give it up on the stripped-down kitchen ‘internet appliances’ (3Com Audrey, Netpliance i-Opener, Virgin Webplayer). Nobody has ever bought one, and nobody ever will.

Forget about forever — nothing lasts a year: Of the thousands of products I’ve reviewed in 10 years, only a handful are still on the market.

Oh, you can find some gadgets whose descendants are still around: iPod, BlackBerry, Internet Explorer and so on. But it’s mind-frying to contemplate the millions of dollars and person-years that were spent on products and services that now fill the Great Tech Graveyard: Olympus M-Robe. PocketPC. Smart Display. MicroMV. MSN Explorer. Aibo. All those PlaysForSure music players, all those Palm organisers, all those GPS units you had to load up with maps from your computer.

Everybody knows that’s the way tech goes. The trick is to accept your gadget’s obsolescence at the time you buy it, so you feel no sense of loss when it’s discontinued next fall.

(The other trick is to learn when that’s going to happen: new cameras in September and February, new iPods in September, new iPhones in July...)

Nobody can keep up: Everywhere I go, I meet people who express the same reaction to consumer tech today: There’s too much stuff coming too fast. It’s impossible to keep up with trends, to know what to buy, to avoid feeling left behind.
They’re right. There’s never been a period of greater technological change. You couldn’t keep up with all of it if you tried.

Well, here’s a dirty little secret: It’s almost too much for me, too. Heck, it’s my job to stay on top of this stuff — and even for me, it’s like drinking from a fire hose. I do my best — I read all the blogs, devour the magazines, attend the conferences and listen to the PR pitches — but I sometimes feel as if I’m furiously paddling my surfboard on the top of a tsunami wave.

In other words, if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone, and it’s OK to let yourself off the hook.

And for that, let us give thanks. Now, can you put down that iPad and pass the gravy?