We’ve got a long way to go…
Some days it’s hard to tell if the tech industry is depressing or the current state should be a cause for optimism. (I’m talking about tech in general, not embedded systems, web apps, phones, etc. This applies to the whole thing.)
I mean, on one hand, in the valley, the supposed technology development center of world, the leading edge of the industry is brought into focus by sites like valleywag, who at this moment are talking about Scoble’s lament that he locked himself into Facebook as his modern day Rolodex. Three months ago he was praising it with: “Facebook is the modern day rolodex.” We may not invent much, but I think we were first to market with ADHD. (If you’re reading this a week from now (10/14/07) and this has no relevance, you’re proving my point.)
What passes for technology development around here is less technology and development and more of a VC-backed popularity contest. There’s a complicated analogy here to musical chairs that I won’t go into. C’mon. Twitter? I can’t go into what I feel about that kind of waste. (Update: Zlango? 12 million bucks? Uncov.com covers this perfectly, as usual.)
It’s just depressing if you look at it from that angle. There’s another, though - consider how far we can go from where we are today. Think about it.
Here’s where we are right now. Silicon vendors are investing huge amounts of time and energy reinventing their lineup so we can have a new weird variant of a chip that does almost what the previous one did, but in some new way that’s, well, really, not usually any better. Then there’s the effort of getting a whole toolchain going that can target the thing. Then there’s the usual bootloader efforts. Once that’s in place OS development is done to support the new variant. Bonus points if it actually uses any of the chip’s new features. Depending on the target area, vendors now take the thing and get their stacks going on it. Once this whole (simplified) chain is complete, it can be wrapped up, productized, boxed, marketed, and sold.
Now people have this new chip that should be able to do all of this fancy stuff, and what do they do with it? They send twitter messages. For a few months. Then it gets pitched in favor of the next generation device, which is really just a way to recoup all of the losses around the errata on all of the technology bits used in the first run.
Sad.
But think where we can go from here. If you feed me an apple, I can metabolize it into energy (and optionally store it) then use that energy to do an amazing number of things. I could build a house. I could write a sonnet (not a very good one, though). I could write long papers on the social importance of Mork and Mindy. I could write useless blog posts.
Feed an apple to technology, any technology, today, and what do you get? Nothing. It’ll rot on top of any MIPS processor you place it on. About the only thing it’ll do is mush and short circuit the board, causing complete and usually irrevocable failure.
Want to get fancy? Feed the apple to an energy conversion technology like a biomass converter. Then you can convert the apple into a suboptimal amount of current that can be fed to a computer. And what will the computer do with it that’s so magical? Not much - really, all they do is ever-more-modern-and-fancy methods of loading memory addresses and performing simple operations on the contents. They can’t comprehend the depth of Robin Williams on cocaine.
There’s something really fundamentally wrong here, but the lesson in the end is that what we have today is complete crap when it comes to technology. There’s a long way to go, and if RTLinux was worth 10M, just think what a fruit-powered sonnet generator is worth!
And now, your moment of zen.