I was thinking about that Steve Jobs keynote from 2007 where Apple launched the iPhone this week. If you have been living in a cave, or for various other reason haven’t seen it you can watch it on YouTube: Steve Jobs MacWorld Keynote in 2007. I wasn’t thinking about it in some kind of romantic nostalgic way though. I just remembered the (small) group of telecom analysts that got out of their beds on the wrong side and started to spew out words on how shit Apple’s new device was. The specs were bad! it didn’t have 3G! It didn’t support MMS (archaic service to send grainy dick pics)! Pro-users wanted a keyboard with buttons! $400 was soooo expensive! ad nauseam…
The funny thing about all this is: NO USER EVER CARED. The first iPhone was a massive success from day one. People queued up for hours and when a friend asked me if I wanted one because his father was commuting between Norway and USA at the time it took me like 10 seconds to say yes, send over the money, jailbreak it to activate outside of US networks and about 3 more minutes to be impressed by how nice it was to use.
At the time I was working in telecom, and we had access to just about every mobile phone released. From the simplest model with oversized buttons and dedicated emergency call buttons made for the elderly, to the business models with full qwerty keyboards, a stylus for using the touch display, office applications (remember that music video where Kelly Rowland tries to text Nelly from Excel?), third party apps and games etc. But the touch displays where slow and needed calibration to make sure the stylus clicked the correct pixel, most apps were shit, 3G was slow and expensive and the mobile versions of websites were terrible, and almost no one actually figured out to setup the various 3G services anyway.
18 months later, Google launched Android, and ever since, the whole industry has been changed. The old competitors withered off into oblivion, Microsoft tried (and failed) to compete, new giants emerged, and every single Telecom Company has seen their revenue streams been replaced by the internet. A new internet that changed from being something we had available at our home computers, in libraries, or at schools, to something we always had accessible in our pockets.
All this made me think about something completely different …
The success of the smart phones all stems from that one quote in Steve Jobs’ keynote: “An iPod, a Phone, an internet communicator. These are not three separate devices”. Add “camera” to the stew and you have a single device that change the way you, as a human, interact with technology.
And most important: Only a small group read, care, and drag out the list of technical specifications when they argue about why X is better than Y.
As a consumer I treat technology as invisible. I don’t care which javascript framework the developers liked best when they built their service, which editor they used, or how their architecture looks like. I care about only two things: Does <x> solve the problem I am trying to find a solution for, and is the user experience nice?
Which leads me to: why are every single technology company trying to force feed me “AI-features” ? Like I’m some kind of goose I’m force fed, with a funnel shoved down my throat to inject corn straight into my belly and enlarge my liver to produce foie gras. AI this, AI that, AI your grandma, the new AI model now has 5x more giga-hypes, AI your productivity and efficiency and everything we can slap a marketing sticker on. And it’s all consistently overselling and under-delivering.
If the most important metric is “x% use AI”, what happens then to the actual problem?
And if use agents to write code (the fun part), what am I left with? writing, and re-writing issues and agent instructions and reviewing iterations of pull requests until it gets right (the boring part)?
Tech should be more like Alfred. Nearly invisible, but immensely useful when needed
- ps: I am not categorically against all use of AI. I think there is a lot of great problems that might be impractical or even impossible without some kind of AI involved. The fact that everyone now can run a Chess computer that is better than the world’s best players is pretty wild, if we can shorten queues in emergency rooms by having machine learning and computer vision say yay or nay if an x-ray is a fracture is awesome, the breakthroughs protein folding from AlphaFold are amazing. But it’s a completely different ball game than the slop-generators, LLMs and GPTs
- ps ps: I also believe we need experimentation. We need to do silly things to find the boundaries, discover new ideas and the world would simply be a more boring place if we only did serious business. But every silly idea does not need to be a billion dollar valued startup.
- ps ps ps: This is the sound you should make if you want to attract a cute cat