I don't buy the taxonomy, I don't buy the evolutionary relationship. Is a screw driver a post-hammer device?
People have a relationship with data, they refine it, they explore it, they correlate it, they hoard it, they spend it to get more data.
Computation, networks, and storage are the tools of data manipulation. Visualization via iPad, visualization via color plotter serves different versions of the same purpose.
As the cost of assembling a sufficiently rich network of computation, network and storage resources drops below the personal value of the data manipulation that the set of resources is capable of, an economic opportunity is created.
Look at network attached LCD 'picture frames' as a canonical example of this value equation playing out in the real world. In 1984 people took color slides printed on cellulose, put a 250W lamp behind them and projected them periodically on the wall. The cost of doing a 'picture frame' application with acceptable resolution was north of $250,000 (yes a quarter of a million dollars, I worked at the Image Processing Institute at USC and we had such a system in house for flipping through a variety of images in "true color" (24 bit RGB) and that is what it cost.) My Mom got a Kodak "easy share" picture frame in 2006 with better resolution and more storage for less than $250.
The constant here is a personal relationship with data (pictures) the variable here is that cost to instantiate that data such that it can be interacted with.
Post-PC implies a sequential relationship with PC. I claim that its a parallel economic relationship. An economic choice is made to view images with the picture frame rather than the slide projector or the laboratory image analysis setup (or the PC).
PC's have a low marginal cost for adding a new data manipulation capability, that gives them great value when new data is encountered. For established data they have a high unrecoverable cost (and on-going maintenance burden).
Tablets 'work' because they provide a data interaction service (surfing the web, reading, watching video, tracking your friends) at less economic cost than a laptop.
Comments
I don't buy the taxonomy, I don't buy the evolutionary relationship. Is a screw driver a post-hammer device?
People have a relationship with data, they refine it, they explore it, they correlate it, they hoard it, they spend it to get more data.
Computation, networks, and storage are the tools of data manipulation. Visualization via iPad, visualization via color plotter serves different versions of the same purpose.
As the cost of assembling a sufficiently rich network of computation, network and storage resources drops below the personal value of the data manipulation that the set of resources is capable of, an economic opportunity is created.
Look at network attached LCD 'picture frames' as a canonical example of this value equation playing out in the real world. In 1984 people took color slides printed on cellulose, put a 250W lamp behind them and projected them periodically on the wall. The cost of doing a 'picture frame' application with acceptable resolution was north of $250,000 (yes a quarter of a million dollars, I worked at the Image Processing Institute at USC and we had such a system in house for flipping through a variety of images in "true color" (24 bit RGB) and that is what it cost.) My Mom got a Kodak "easy share" picture frame in 2006 with better resolution and more storage for less than $250.
The constant here is a personal relationship with data (pictures) the variable here is that cost to instantiate that data such that it can be interacted with.
Post-PC implies a sequential relationship with PC. I claim that its a parallel economic relationship. An economic choice is made to view images with the picture frame rather than the slide projector or the laboratory image analysis setup (or the PC).
PC's have a low marginal cost for adding a new data manipulation capability, that gives them great value when new data is encountered. For established data they have a high unrecoverable cost (and on-going maintenance burden).
Tablets 'work' because they provide a data interaction service (surfing the web, reading, watching video, tracking your friends) at less economic cost than a laptop.