Pervasive Application

The continuous innovation of hardware technology in last two decade made it possible for all of us to have 4 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM and 100GB HD in our desktop PCs, notebooks, and even game consoles. It sounds great, but I think it is time for all of us in this industry to think if this is the right direction to continue throughout the next decade.

Let's take a look at the list of technologies below and rank them based on the significance to our own lifestyle change in last five years.

A. Personal Computers (Windows PC, Mac ...)
B. Game Consoles (PS2, XBox ...)
C. Portal Game Consoles (PSP, DS ...)
D. Portal Music Player (iPod ...)
E. Cell phones (including Blackberry)
F. Web (Google, Blog, Amazon, SNS, Social Bookmark ...)

I believe the majority of us will choose E or F as the most significant one, while younger people will probably rank C and D higher. Very few people will choose A and B as the technology that changed their lifestyle in last five years.

It is important to notice that PCs became an integral part of our life in late 90's, but the incremental improvement to the hardware and software after Windows 95 (faster CPU, more memory, Windows XP) had a very small impact to our lifestyle.

This fact makes me believe that it's time for the whole industry to pay attention to the total user experience, which involves variety of devices, network, contents, applications and services. Instead of putting more CPU-powers and memory to each device, we should pay much more attention to contents, applications and services that the user will access from those devices and figure out the way to make them much more accessible and available.

I firmly believe that the total user experience would be much better, if we allow users to own, subscribe to, or maintain music, video, photos, games, applications and services somewhere on the Internet and access them from any devices, regardless of CPU, Operating system or network.

I call it "pervasive application" user experience.

Here is an example. A user starts playing an on-line chess game with a friend from home using her Mac mini. She continues to play it while she drives her car to the office using the car-navigator. She continues to play it while she is waiting for her low-fat late at Starbucks using her cell phone. She even continues to play from her Office using her Windows PC while her boss is not watching.

It means applications that require only 40MHz CPU and 1MB of memory on the client side will have much more value to the users than applications that requires 4GHz CPU, 1GB memory and GPU, because they will run virtually everywhere.

I am not saying that applications must be designed for lowest common denominators. Those applications simply need to be designed "scalable" so that it takes advantage of those extra resources only when they are available. The online chess game described above will take advantage of 3D graphics capability on PCs and use voice input technology on car navigators, but it still runs on low-end Java phones that have limited CPU power and tiny screen.

I believe next generations of applications including productivity applications (word-processor, spreadsheet ...), games (on-line chess, gambling, MMORPG, FPS ...) and content-services (video-on-demand service, online music store, daily comic reader ...) should be built as pervasive applications so that the user can enjoy those contents and services no matter what devices they have or what kind of network is available.

Comments

[Pete Stoppani]

This notion of "pervasive application" makes a lot of sense and is very compelling.

I find it interesting that you call it "application" when in the description you refer to data and content. I believe in the Mac world, they like to create a document-centric user model vs. an application-centric model, which companies like Microsoft seem to favor. For example, Mac calls their media center iTunes while MS calls it a Media Player.

I'm starting to think that it doesn't matter much and am more inclined to go with the app-centric model. For example, I can wash my dishes with my camera. The tool/app name implies what you can do with it.

So, "pervasive application" works for me :)

Nicely written BTW!
Pete

[Pete Stoppani]

Oops! I meant "I *cannot* wash my dishes with my camera"...