In Chapter 9, we talked about the idea of restoration, how God will one day restore mankind to its original sinless condition. The book of Revelation foretells the end of the world but it also presents us with a picture of a new city in heaven, one that is eternal and free of the defects of our existing man-made versions.

That restoration will happen at some point, but what happens until then? If technology is “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”, what happens when it fails? What happens when the transformation brought about by human activity is not exactly the kind of transformation we were hoping for? In Chapter 9, we said that every technology has a trade-off of some kind, an opportunity cost. What happens when those costs spiral out of control?

Technicism.

We tend to believe that virtually any problem can be solved with enough technology. Nutrition, health care, transportation, affordable housing, energy, education, communication: all areas in which we believe technology can make our lives better. And it does. Over the past couple of centuries, we’ve been able to live longer, healthier lives with a much greater standard of living. Many of the diseases that once took millions of lives annually are either now eradicated or easily treatable. We’re able to live and work more comfortably and have a lot more spare time on our hands. The cost of goods and services is amazingly low and even those in the lowest economic sector can typically afford items unobtainable by previous generations. We have instant access to every imaginable source of information via the Internet and routinely share our experiences globally with people we’ve never even met. Stephen Monsma refers to this idea that technology can solve all our problems as “technicism”, and he argues that it’s become a “kind of unspoken religion for the secular world”.

Driving this ideology is what Albert Borgmann calls the “device paradigm”:

For Borgmann, a “device” is not just a mechanical or electronic gadget. Instead, he uses the word “device” to refer to a tool whose function takes a long, difficult process for a human and makes it available at the press of a button or the flip of a switch. For example, 150 years ago heating a home required going outside, finding trees, cutting them down, chopping the wood, bringing the wood inside, and starting a fire in the fireplace. This process would take significant time, and keeping the fire going would require skill and practice. But today, the commodity of heat is available at the press of a button through a device. Most of us don’t think about where it comes from or how it works, because even a child can operate a thermostat.

Of course, Borgmann would say that this readily available heat is a good thing that often saves lives. But he points out that the device is also doing something that we don’t notice—it is hiding the process of making heat. We press a button and heat comes out, but we don’t know what goes on inside our walls or underneath our houses, and we no longer go about the practice of making heat ourselves.

As we move to more advanced technology, we learn how to do more, better, faster, easier. But in the process we forget how to do the basics. Few of us have ever had to grow our own vegetables and slaughter our own animals for food; instead we just grab what we need (already prepackaged) from the grocery store or buy it already cooked at a restaurant. And even if we still know how to do something, we often don’t want to because it’s too inefficient or time-consuming. There’s a saying in the software development community, “AI is the UI.” That is, artificial intelligence (often in the form of voice recognition) is fast becoming just as important as the graphical user interface when designing new technology. Whereas people were once thrilled to be able to trade in a once arduous manual process for one that could be accomplished with a couple of buttons, they now want to trade those buttons in, expecting technology to just work with as little input as possible.

That’s not to say technology doesn’t provide benefits. It absolutely does. But the more we have of it, the more we become dependent on it. Take away Google, and I can still find a telephone listing in the yellow pages. But my kids have probably never even seen a phone book. Sit me down in front a card catalog, and I could find eventually find the book I was looking for. But my kids would have no idea where to begin. And the same is true for my parents and me. My stepdad used to change his own oil and fix the engine in his truck. I can change a flat tire and check the oil, but most car repairs are way beyond me.

Overdependence on technology is a serious problem. Take away telecommunications, electricity, food processing and distribution, health care, and clean tap water at a local level for a short amount of time, and everyone else can pick up the slack and help provide and rebuild. Take them away at a national level, and you plunge the country and perhaps most of the world into chaos.

And it’s not just technology. We’ve built our society on a house of cards technologically, politically, economically, and environmentally. And while global trade has in once sense made us more resilient, it’s also made us more interdependent; when one of those nations fails, it could easily take down all of us. Ironically, for all of our incredible technological advances, today we’re far more vulnerable than the Mayans, Incans, and Romans, all of whom had incredibly advanced empires before collapsing in the blink of an eye.

Borgmann argues that instead of throwing out technology en masse, we need to first figure out what our values are and then intentionally use technology according those values. Of course, that’s easier said than done. As we become more and more dependent on technology, it becomes harder to objectively evaluate it. At some point the “technology as methodology” and “technology as usage” don’t even matter; we just need the thing to work.

What we need, then, is some kind of framework with which we can know which tools to use and how best to use them. And that will come tomorrow with my final blog of the book.

Previously:
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 1: Perspective
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 2: Imagination
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 3: Reflection
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 4: Definition
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 5: Rebellion
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 6: Approach
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 7: Redemption (cont’d)
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 8: Mediums
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 9: Restoration

Imagination.

In Chapter 2, he builds upon this point by looking at exactly what technology is, defining it in terms of a narrative:

Though we might not realize it, we compose these mininarratives whenever we encounter even the simplest gadget. If we happen to see a shovel, our minds can easily imagine the act of digging a hole, visualizing how the ground will look after we’re finished. This small effort of the imagination has a clear movement from beginning (the world before the shovel) to middle (the act of digging) to end (the world with a new hole)—the basic arc of any story. …

Technology, then, is the bridge from this world to the imagined one.

I couldn’t help but to think about author Donald Miller here. In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Miller defines a story as “a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.” In Dyer’s narrative, then, we use technology as a tool to overcome a conflict (i.e. lack of a solution) in order to get what we want or need.

If I need to get to work, at the beginning of that narrative, I don’t have any way of doing so. I can imagine a number of ways to overcome that conflict–walking, riding a bike, horse and buggy–but none of those methods will get me to work safely and on time. Finally, I consider a car and question whether that’ll do the trick, which I realize it will. The car acts as a tool or bridge to help me overcome my conflict and get from the beginning of the story (a world in which I don’t have any way to get from home to work) to the end (the world in which that’s now possible).

With that in mind, it seems logical, then, that the Church would want to fully embrace technology. If it’s a bridge that can help it overcome conflict to meet its needs (reaching the world for Christ), then that’s a good thing, right? It is, and we’ve seen numerous ways in which the Church is using technology to do just that. But the problem comes when technology is no longer the means to an end but the end itself.

How many Apple fanboys rushed out to buy the iPad when it came out, not because they needed it, not because it was a tool that helped them overcome some unconquered conflict in order to get what they really wanted, but simply because it was cool? It was from Apple, after all, so it was instantly considered magical. Never mind that there were other existing devices that did the same thing. There were other e-readers out there (not to mention paper-bound books), iPhones that ran the same apps, laptops and desktops that could browse the Internet. The iPad provided no real new functionality whatsoever, but as soon as Steve Jobs revealed it, they decided they couldn’t live without it. He could’ve charged them a thousand bucks for an “iEtch-A-Sketch”, and they would’ve been just as happy.

As Dyer mentions, when we use technology, we not only transform the world around us but are transformed ourselves. And technology, especially the Internet, has a capacity to dramatically transform us. When we do a search on Google or browse our Twitter feeds or check up on our Facebook friends, our brains release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with the reward center of the brain. And we can easily become addicted to it, just as people can get addicted to sex, gambling, or shopping.

But it’s not just the dopamine rush we have to worry about. As Nicholas Carr explains in The Shallows, the very way we think is being changed by the Internet. From The Guardian:

“It’s a basic principle that the brain is very sensitive to any kind of stimulation, and from moment to moment, there is a very complex cascade of neurochemical electrical consequences to every form of stimulation. If you have repeated stimuli, your neural circuits will be excited. But if you neglect other stimuli, other neural circuits will be weakened.” This is the nub of Carr’s argument: that the online world so taxes the parts of the brain that deal with fleeting and temporary stuff that deep thinking becomes increasingly impossible. As he sees it: “Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow.

[Psychiatrist Dr. Gary] Small is only too aware of what too much time spent online can do to other mental processes. Among the young people he calls digital natives (a term first coined by the US writer and educationalist Marc Prensky), he has repeatedly seen a lack of human contact skills – “maintaining eye contact, or noticing non-verbal cues in a conversation”. …

He also fears that texting and instant messaging may already be dampening human creativity, because “we’re not thinking outside the box, by ourselves – we’re constantly vetting all our new ideas with our friends.” He warns that multitasking – surely the internet’s essential modus operandi – is “not an efficient way to do things: we make far more errors, and there’s a tendency to do things faster, but sloppier.”

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with using the Internet or tweeting or buying an iPad for that matter. They can be very effective tools to help us overcome conflict and fulfill a pressing need. But as a Church, we have to be careful that the medium itself doesn’t become the message. Equipping your church staff with iPads is fine if it meets a specific need, but we shouldn’t buy everyone iPads just because we want to be “relevant”. As Dyer says,

If God is our savior and he wins in the end, does technology even matter? Obviously, we should use technology for good and not for evil, but does anything more need to be said? If it is true that technology has the capacity to shape the world that God made, as well as shape our bodies, minds, and souls, then it seems we should care deeply about our tools. Moreover, if technology plays some role in the story of God redeeming his people, we should care all the more.

Previously:
From the Garden to the City, Ch. 1: Perspective
Church dot com
Proof that in social networks, smaller is actually better
‘How Apple Plays Upon Our Insecurities’

Actually, I should rephrase that. I’ve been on Google+ now for three weeks, and I really want to like it.

I want to use it. I want other people to use it. I want it to be awesome. So far, though, it’s been mostly disappointing.

Like me, it seems like a lot of people just haven’t found a good use for it. Maybe because it doesn’t really fit in with the existing Facebook/Twitter ecosystem. Nothing about it feels natural or cohesive or intertwined with any of our other social networks. Of course, this is largely due to Google not publishing their API for third-parties to use, but I think it’s also because anything posted there seems so incredibly redundant.

Tech blogs are already starting to wonder if Google+ is on life support. I wouldn’t go that far yet, but clearly the clock is ticking. People are quickly losing interest, and the quieter the stream gets, the less incentive there is to come back. Just ask MySpace.

So what needs to happen for Google+ to succeed? Several things, I think.

First, Google needs to remove the invite-only restriction. Let anybody in. There are still people who want to use it but can’t get an invite. Don’t turn them away.

Second, give people a reason to actually use it once they’re on. Show us how it complements — not replaces — what we’re already doing. If you’re gonna name your product “+”, then show us how it’s actually adding something to our lives. So far, Google hasn’t done that. I’m following 43 people, and only two or three of those are still actively posting anything to it. Most have never posting anything at all except for their profile pic. That’s not a good sign. As someone tweeted recently, “Google+ feels like a house party that just ran out of alcohol. Everyone’s just standing around, waiting.”

Third, publish your API so that third-parties can integrate into it. When someone checks in through Gowalla or Foursquare, they should have the option of posting that check-in to Google+. When I post a public Google+ update, I should have the option of having it automatically tweeted (without having to use a third-party workaround). There needs to be a Facebook Connect-style Google login option on websites. Yes, a lot of this stuff tends to pollute the Facebook news feed, but it also adds value and content, which is sorely lacking at the moment.

Fourth, fix the circles. One of Google+’s big selling points was how easy it was to create various circles in order to post to different groups of people. We could post to just family members or to just people we’re following or to the whole world, whatever we felt like doing. But in practice, the circles feature is incredibly awkward. Imagine following 200 people and trying to segregate them out into 5 or 6 circles. The UI makes it extraordinarily cumbersome. I gave up trying to organize people into multiple circles, so everybody just goes into the same one. Besides, anything I post is public anyway, so it doesn’t even matter. Mark Zuckerberg has said before that people don’t like making lists. If the central core of your product involves people making lists (or circles or squares or trapezoids or any other polygon), then it better be really frickin’ easy to do, otherwise people won’t use it.

There are other things as well, such as making the stream chronological, adding people’s +1s to their stream, and being able to search content and follow trends. Things we’re already used to seeing in Facebook and Twitter.

Most of these things are likely in the pipeline, but I have to wonder if it’ll be too little, too late. I hope not. Overall, I think it’s a great product. It just needs more.

Previously:
If Google+ isn’t social, then what is it?
It’s not Facebook that should be scared of Google+, it’s Twitter
Google+ or minus

Even though its users have profiles, follow others, post status updates, upload photos and videos, and “+1″ a bunch of stuff.

But don’t call it a social network.

You see, according to a slideshow from “first time tech founder” Vincent Wong, Google+ isn’t meant to take on Facebook or Twitter. It’s meant to take on this guy:

In Wong’s world, Google+ is merely an extension of Google’s cloud strategy. Email, documents, photos, videos, etc. etc. Everything in the cloud. More specifically, everything in Google’s cloud. And everything revolving around a user’s single Google sign-in.

Google+, then, becomes just another piece of Google’s web-centric attack on Microsoft and Apple, a natural step beyond Chrome and Gmail and Google Docs. It’s not an affront to Facebook or Twitter, it’s ammunition against Microsoft’s Windows and Office platform and Apple’s iOS.

Sounds good. But I don’t buy it.

If it were really just about “collaboration”, then Google would’ve added Google Docs integration from the outset, which it hasn’t yet done. It would’ve integrated it with Gmail, which hasn’t been done. It wouldn’t have featured the “+1″ functionality as prominently. And it wouldn’t be scrambling to add Facebook-like corporate accounts.

Wong’s vision sounds nice, and there’s probably a measure of truth to it. But it doesn’t add up (no pun intended). No, Google+ is too inherently social to not call it social.

Besides, even if Wong is wight, er, right, that doesn’t mean anything. Look at Facebook and Twitter. Each is used extremely differently than how they were originally intended. Facebook started out as a college-only social network that didn’t even include a wall, let alone FarmVille. And even after it opened up to non-students, it evolved slowly. (Remember when status updates were hardcoded with the word “is”? Jason is hungry. Jason is eating a ham sandwich. Jason is thinking he really like ham sandwiches.) And Twitter’s 140-character limitation came from the original concept of updates via text messages: 20 characters for the Twitter handle and 140 for the message. Retweets, short URLs, #FollowFriday? Those didn’t come from Twitter, they came from its legion of twitterers.

So while prognosticators like Wong sound almost convincing with their nifty PowerPoint slides and terms like “blue ocean strategy”, the reality is, no one really knows what Google+ will end up being or even if it’ll stick around beyond the “ooh, what’s that?” phase. But if it does stick around, I’m betting it’ll be pretty social.

Previously:
It’s not Facebook that should be scared of Google+, it’s Twitter
Google+ or minus

At first glance, it’s easy to compare Google’s new social network to Facebook since there are a lot of similarities. And if Google+ is really meant to replace Facebook, then I don’t give it much of a chance to succeed. After all, with 750 million users worldwide, it’s gonna take a lot to convince them to pack up their digital belongings and move to Google. But what if it’s not Facebook that Google+ is meant to replace?

What if it’s Twitter?

On the surface, it seems silly; Google+ doesn’t resemble the microblogging platform at all. But actually, it kinda does. Both sites use the same asynchronous “follow” model in that anyone can follow anyone else without that person having to follow back. (Unlike Facebook’s synchronous “friend” model.) And that’s extremely significant.

Yesterday, I mentioned that the people I had added to my Google+ circles were all people I was following on Twitter and that the people who had added me were also following me on Twitter. I therefore questioned the purpose of Google+. If anything I posted was also something I would tweet, then what’s the point?

But maybe that is the point. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but it actually makes sense: despite the resemblance to Facebook, by default Google+ actually behaves more like Twitter. Why? Because of the “follow” model.

But then Google+ goes further, removing the 140-character limitation, adding comments, and hosting photos and videos locally. While Twitter’s stripped-down approach has made it a unique experience, it hasn’t necessarily made it a user-friendly one. Despite Twitter having over 200 million users, only a small fraction of those actually use the service regularly. Compare that to Facebook, which sees about half of its users log in daily. Why the difference in usage between Facebook in Twitter? In part, it could be because of Facebook’s “walled garden” approach to networking, but I suspect Twitter’s steep learning curve has a lot to do with it as well. And it seems like Google is trying to alleviate that learning curve in Google+ by adding the Facebook-like features that Twitter lacks. Instead of Facebook+, Google’s new creation is more like Twitter+.

Now, do I really expect Google+ to be the death of Twitter? No, at least not in the near term. But it’s not as far-fetched as I originally thought, either, particularly if Google+ continues to pick up momentum. And that could be very, very interesting.

Previously:
Google+ or minus
History of the Internet (infographic)
Welcome to the future

Way to go, Google.

It’s not that Google+ is a bad product, although while it’s still in its early stages, it’s extremely bare in functionality. Rather, the problem as I see it is that it’s completely unnecessary. There’s nothing it does that other, more established social networks don’t already do, the biggest of course being Facebook. And this redundancy provides absolutely no value whatsoever.

Having been on Google+ three days now, I’ve added 10 people to my Following circle, all of which are people I already follow on Twitter. But only one of those actually posts anything. The other nine? Nothing.

Of the ten people I’ve added, four have added me back. Which is great. But I don’t have anything to post either. Anything I would post to Google+ I would also tweet, and those four people are already following me on Twitter, so what’s the point?

But what about family members and friends and coworkers and that kid who beat me up in junior high? Surely given enough time, they’ll all join in, and then I can add them to their various circles and share other non-tweetable stuff and it’ll be awesome, right? Well, no. I mean, first of all, you’re expecting everyone who’s already on Facebook to leave Facebook and use Google+ instead, and that’s not going to happen. Second, even if it did, is that really a good thing? Personally, I hate Facebook. I hate everything about it. The more I see of my friends and family on Facebook, the more I want to become Amish just so I never have to see another one of their stupid Facebook status updates ever again. (And yes, I know that some Amish actually do have Facebook accounts, which seems incredibly hypocritical to me, but whatever. I digress.)

The point is, I don’t want my Google+ stream to be another Facebook, but I don’t need it to be a carbon copy of my Twitter feed either. So what exactly am I supposed to do with it?

Instead of creating another version of Facebook, Google should do what companies like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Instagram have done: create a service that complements the existing Facebook/Twitter ecosystem instead of replaces it. Such services can act as stand-alone social networks, but they’re successful because they integrate and enhance the Facebook and/or Twitter experience. They extend the socialness of users’ primary networks, and that makes them valuable. So far, Google+ does none of that. There’s no integration with any other third-parties, no easy way to port your latest Instagram pic or Tweet or Foursquare check-in to it, and no way to port Google+ updates to Twitter or Facebook. And even once Google does open its API to third-parties, it’s unclear how that will work with the “circles” concept of Google+.

The bottom line is that at the moment Google+ is nothing more than a novelty, an interesting idea that had it come along four or five years ago would’ve been an instant success. But now that success is far less certain. If Google can convince its early adopters that it’s worth using, then it may actually survive, albeit forever in Facebook’s shadow. But if not, the novelty will soon wear off, and its users will go elsewhere.

Previously:
Welcome to the future
I can’t even pretend to care about Facebook anymore
Proof that in social networks, smaller is actually better
A little social network housecleaning

Source.

Previously:
It’s the end of the Internet as we know it (and I feel fine)
Welcome to the future
Can you hear me now?
Vanity Fair’s history of the Internet

A couple of days ago, I was looking through Outlook and came across some emails from 2004 when I was doing some freelance web design work for a small ministry in Nacogdoches. The lady who ran the ministry had had a website built but couldn’t afford to keep paying the designer to maintain it. I heard about her through my wife and offered to take it over for practically nothing. Now, I should preface this by saying that I don’t consider myself in any way to be a web designer. But at the time, I had aspirations of building a web design business, so I was eager to get a real (paying!) client.

The existing site was a mess. The designer had used Flash to build all the navigation menus (almost a dozen of of them), so simply creating a new page required editing multiple Flash files. And the HTML was so convoluted, any significant changes to the existing pages were next to impossible without redoing the whole thing.

I hated that website.

As I looked through the emails, I wondered whatever became of it. Not surprisingly, the old site has since been replaced by a new one built on WordPress. There’s embedded video and audio clips, links to Twitter and Facebook, and pretty much everything else you would expect to find on a WordPress blog.

It’s amazing how much the Internet has changed since 2004. Even though blogs existed back then, they certainly weren’t as popular or robust as they are now. Websites like my client’s were built as static HTML pages, typically created with Dreamweaver and utilizing very little CSS. Pages were structured with tables, made to ensure compatibility with Internet Explorer. And forget RSS feeds or social media integration. Google Reader, YouTube, and Twitter didn’t even exist yet.

But we take all that for granted today. In 2004 my client had wanted a video posted on the homepage of the site. We were going to post it in Quicktime format so it would work with both PCs and Macs. But I never added it because the size was atrocious; anyone using a dial-up connection would end up waiting forever for the page to load. Today, we would just embed a YouTube video and be done with it.

To get an idea of how far we’ve come in the last several years, consider:

• The WordPress platform was first created in 2003. Today, there are over 32 million WordPress blogs and websites on the Internet.
• Facebook launched in 2004 and now has over 500 million users worldwide and is valued at $50 billion.
• Firefox 1.0 was also released in 2004. Today, it has a bigger market share in Europe than Internet Explorer and commands about 26% of the browser market in the U.S.
• YouTube was created in 2005. As of 2010, 35 hours of video is uploaded to the site every minute resulting in over 2 billion views per day.
• Google Reader, one of the most popular RSS readers on the Internet, was also created in 2005.
• Twitter was launched in 2006. Today, it has over 190 million users, 100 million of which were added in 2010 alone (and who tweeted 25 billion times last year).
• Google Chrome was released in 2008. It now occupies about 10% of the U.S. browser market and is the fastest growing web browser, with usage expected to double in 2011.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The point is, the world has changed a lot just in the past 5 or 6 years, and there’s no doubt it’ll continue to change at an exponential rate for the foreseeable future. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get those flying cars we were promised.

Previously:
AT&T’s abandoned plan to take over radio
Can you hear me now?
‘Information overload’ vs. ‘cognitive surplus’
Vanity Fair’s history of the Internet

Gizmodo has a post out about what Microsoft’s successor to Windows 7 will look like. Pretty much anyone you talk to will mention the same things: more cloud integration, better hardware management, better security, faster boot time, expanded use of virtualization, etc. All good answers, and I think accurate ones.

But my gut tells me that if you really want to know what Windows 8 will look like, just look at an iPad. Forget Windows XP, Vista, or even Windows 7. Windows 8 will more closely resemble Apple’s iOS or Google’s Chrome OS than any of its predecessors.

Why? Several reasons:

The desktop is dead.

OK, the traditional desktop PC isn’t dead; far from it. But the shift over the last few years has been away from desktops and laptops and toward smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and other Internet-connected devices (HDTVs, game consoles, etc.). As a result, what we traditionally refer to as an operating system has shifted. It’s no longer about the machine; it’s about the apps. It’s about the data, or more specifically accessing that data anywhere from any device. The OS is no longer the focus, it’s now just the shell. A traditional Windows OS doesn’t fit this model; iOS does.

Microsoft has a history of playing catch-up.

I’m no Apple fanboy, but let’s face it, Microsoft has always lagged behind when it comes to innovation. Windows, Internet Explorer, smartphones, media players. In each case, Microsoft has had success, sometimes even dominating the industry. But that doesn’t mean they have the best or most innovative products. While IE may still own the majority of the browser market, other web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Opera have led in terms of performance, web standards, and innovation. Microsoft recently released an overhauled smartphone platform, but it’s still not as mature or robust as those from Apple, Google, or RIM, all of whom have platforms that are light-years ahead of Windows Phone 7.

The same trend can be seen with Windows, which has historically included features in new versions that the Mac OS had in previous ones. Translucent windows and User Account Control were introduced in Vista in 2007, but similar features existed in OS X as late as 2005. Microsoft overhauled the taskbar in Windows 7 in 2009, but the goal was to make it behave more like OS X’s dock, which was first introduced in 2001. Over the years, Windows and OS X have become much more alike than different, and since iOS is affecting how OS X looks and behaves (for example, the recently announced Mac App Store), one would expect Microsoft to eventually follow suit (which apparently, is already in the works).

Windows Phone 7 may succeed.

The success of the iPhone prompted Apple to replicate its OS for the iPod, iPad, and Apple TV, and features such as the App Store will make it to OS X. And the success of Chrome and the Android smartphone OS led Google to port Android to tablets and create the Chrome OS for netbooks.

Windows Phone 7′s “Metro” interface, meanwhile, took its inspiration from the Zune. If Microsoft’s new Phone platform is even marginally successful, expect Metro to seriously influence the look and feel of Windows 8.

Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates.

This one is obvious. Steve Ballmer will never come close to rivaling Bill Gates, either in terms of innovation or commercial success. Microsoft dominated in the ’90s largely because of Gates’ vision and leadership. In contrast, since becoming CEO in 2000, Ballmer has kept Microsoft profitable, but that’s about it. Even with successes such as XP, the Xbox, and Bing, Microsoft has lost ground to Apple, Google, Mozilla, Nintendo, and others. Somehow I just don’t have confidence that under Ballmer’s leadership, Microsoft will ever truly be revolutionary. If iOS and Chrome are forging ahead, expect Ballmer to follow blindly in their footsteps.

To be clear, I don’t necessarily expect Windows 8 to look or even behave exactly like Apple’s iOS. But I predict it will borrow heavily from its ideology: the concept of a stripped-down OS that is app-driven and web-integrated. Of course, knowing Microsoft, I could be completely wrong.

Previously:
‘Innovation at scale’ proves just how out of touch Microsoft is
The biggest mistake Microsoft made with Windows 7
Is this what ‘Microsoft mojo’ looks like?