Meditations on the Death of the Mouse

The winner is the cell phone, and the losers are all heading down the path of extinction, or to bit roles in the information/communication/collaboration ecosystem.

In the very near-future, all entertainment/communication/collaboration devices will be more like your cell phone.

This means that companies that are slapping on computer-like interfaces to TVs because they think that people want to interact with their TV the way they now surf the web are heading down an evolutionary dead-end. Companies that are betting their future on adding TV-like features to laptops are heading down a different dead-end.

Here is an easy-litmus test.  If the device/service that you are looking at depends on mouse/keyboard as the primary method of interacting with the system, you are staring at an endangered species.

Yes, the iPad is “just” a big iPhone. That is the point.

Reading with the Kindle is like drinking espresso from a paper cup. A Kindle is a flattened mouse,  road-kill.

I was talking to a colleague about the death of the mouse, and he said, “Apps are back.” Then with a rather pained look on his face, he added, “The web was a giant step back for application development. You know, it’s all Apple….this attention to the user interface.”

I have been thinking about his comments for the last few days. And it brought up a memory. A couple of Christmases ago, I bought Wii for my daughter. We started up the game, and I said, “Oh my God, what a great interface.” She said, “Dad, you really are weird.” I also got very excited by the ability to shake my iPhone to start a new game of Quordy (really, Boggle) on my iPhone. (It wasn’t a click!)

Flicking, shaking, stretching, rotating, hearing. These are all capabilities that apps will need to survive in the new eco-system. Web sites do none of these things.

Prediction: The web will be re-shaped more rapidly than we can imagine and there will be “rivers where the houses ran.”