The 4 waves of the PC era - what's coming next?

I have been noodling for a while over this post by Om Malik: http://bit.ly/bNwuUP

WHAT’S HAPPENED? WHAT’S COMING?

I wanted to throw my own oar into the pond on this one, as it’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last year or two, as we’ve turned our vague ideas about where “Apps” were going into a beta-product allied to a bold vision for the future.

You can slice and dice trends in many ways. The truth is there’s something fractal about the nature of trends - the closer you look at them the more they splinter into smaller and smaller fibres of subtrends, movements, products etc. People are eager to jump from the neatly titled Web 2.0 into something they can call Web 3.0 while labeling the dot.com boom some sort of Web 1.0. This is fundamentally wrong because the web was only part of why so many people suddenly wanted the Internet - indeed for most just getting an email address was the initial intent. All schemas to describe the complexity of technological progress are inherently flawed in their omission and simplification, but I have found it helpful is to think of four waves.

FAMILIARIZATION or COMPUTERIZATION

The first was the PC boom and Bill Gates’ vision of a computer in every home. By the late 90s PCs were no longer just for early adopters but were indeed in most homes - even if their acceptance was initially arrived at via school and the workplace.

CONNECTION or THE INTERNET BOOM

Once we all had computers the road was paved for the second wave which culminated in the dot.com boom, in which the Internet emerged from being an academic tool to a global system connecting all of these personal computers together.

SOCIALIZATION or WEB2.0

What I think of as the third wave is what many of us refer to as Web 2.0 - a cover all name that is at once applied to both the companies that emerged post-crash with a social layer built into their very fabric and the underlying technologies and methodologies they use (e.g. AJAX). It is this socialization aspect that is of lasting import. Where Wave 1 put computers in each home and Wave 2 connected them together, Wave 3 connected the people behind the computers together.

Which brings me to where we go from here. I think the next wave - and these waves don’t have clean dividing line but overlap and blur into each other - has already begun.

NORMALIZATION or THE ELIMINATION OF THE PC

Smartphones. The iPad. The coming smart, app-enabled TVs. What they all have in common, what makes them all part of the fourth wave, is that the fourth wave is about removing the computer - or more specifically the PC-like device. Content and services sit in the cloud and. The social layer is increasingly just part of the infrastructure delivering them to us in better optimized ways. But we’ll access them through devices more appropriate to the everyday lifestyles of ordinary people - our TVs, our games consoles, our smartphones, our iPads.

Much content creation will continue to be done on PC like devices for some time to come (high end MacBooks and the like). Some will never leave those sorts of machines by necessity, some will find other creation dynamics - as is already happening (think iPhone - Qik, Dailybooth, directly uploaded). Maybe just less visible then, not completely eliminated.

Content consumption is another story. We already have a device with a century of optimization and cultural learning behind it - the TV. The TV will get smarter, smartphones and tablets will be more TV-like. It won’t surprise people that my bet with App.Co is on Apps on your TV.

SUMMARY

The progression to me looks like: Getting computers in the hands of people; connecting those computers together; then connecting the people behind those computers together; and now normalization - truly integrating the gains of the PC era, the dot.com boom and web 2.0 into the lives of mass market users without the pains associated with and tolerated by early adopters.