New technologies allow us to do more, in new ways, in new places. Renowned computer historian Paul Ceruzzi notes that the emergence of a new computing platform “is as much the result of social and political negotiation among a variety of groups as it is the natural emergence of the most efficient or technically best design”.
The introduction of new technologies come with the same series of questions: “What’s it for?” “What’s the first application?” “It looks like a toy?” “I can basically already do this with my current technology?” Answering these questions, and successfully deploying a new general purpose computing platform requires a collection of solutions. We need people to recognize the new technology, via metaphor. We need the platform to allow any creative developer to build their application. And we need the components of the platform to offer applications that could never have been built with the previous technology.
Platform shifts are rate, but when they happen they re-architect the entire industry. Understanding how they happen helps us create, deploy, and thrive in the a new, more capable, future.
Metaphors
Metaphors give us a way of recognizing the future. Even back in 1830, Charles Babbage saw the value of metaphor in new technology introduction, by calling his invention the “analytical engine”. More recently, Steven Levy points out in Incredibly Great, the founding story of the Mac, metaphor was the “key to making computers comprehensible”. Steve Jobs himself used metaphor in introducing the value of the personal computer being a “bicycle for the mind". The metaphors that made computer truly comprehensible was the “desktop” metaphor created by Alan Kay and the team at Xerox PARC. (PARC was given the directive to examine the implications of a “paperless office”, something important to Xerox so it makes some sense that they came up with the desktop metaphor and “printing digital bits” using WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get.) People were familiar with the concept of a desktop and could envision how it would work, and importantly, what it could be done for.
The WYSIWYG demo from Xerox PARC. See, it’ just like a regular piece of paper!
Design teams looking to build the next platform beyond the PC had a confusing mix of metaphors. In part this was due to the anchoring of the personal computer, the overwhelming success of the iPod, and the creative destruction of the digital camera. These influences on the eventual smartphone industry were strong: Andy Rubin ha said that Android was originally conceived as a better OS for digital cameras.
This led to a number of confused metaphors (and Frankenstein-like product mutants): the N91 “music phone”, the nGage “game-deck phone”, and the N95 “multimedia computer phone”. Complexity theorist and technology historian Brian Arthur calss this “combinatorial evolution”..
Since the late eighties, what seemed to dominate, was the idea of the “extended desktop”. The metaphor came in many forms: “handheld computer”, “pocket PC”, “multimedia computer”, “personal digital assistants”. The PC in your pocket metaphor is still even in use today, with the common “supercomputer in your pocket” idea. I would argue that the word computer is too ambiguous to be useful and contributed to these devices (prior to the smartphone) not generating a new platform shift.
This metaphor class was thrown out abruptly in January 2007. On stage, Steve Jobs said explicitly, Apple was “reinventing the phone.” In a NYT interview Jobs was again explicit: “these are more like iPods than they are like computers.” There were many commercial drivers for this too; the iPod was a blowout success, in an anchoring the consumers to the iPod Jobs had introduced the iPhone with a success halo.
Jobs also made a very deliberate choice in introducing the product, famously announcing three products in one: “widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device” (nothing about computing.) In this way, repeated so often it became a joke for the audience, Jobs was pounding the table with the idea that this one device was new, complementary, general purpose platform.
Metaphors allow us to recognize the future. They are a necessary simplification of something new that allows for faster, and broader adoption. It simultaneously anchors the developer to some understanding of purpose, and at the same time hints at a new opportunity. Platform shift step 1 done.