Technology and Where We Are Headed

Technology and Where We Are Headed

Every once in a while I’ll talk to someone about what it’s like being a web programmer or designer. They will eventually say something like.

“Man, I really missed the boat on that one. I wish I got into it a long time ago.”

To which I reply, “Stick around, everything will change in about 6 months.”

And to a large extent that has been a pretty accurate statement. The number one rule of the internet for my entire career has been that it changes all of the time. Whatever was in a year ago could very easily be on it’s way out today. It is the most fluid environment to work in that I have ever seen in any industry.

Technology isn’t like accounting, or carpentry or plumbing. You can learn those fields and build on them over the lifetime of your career. With technology you make a bet that whatever you are studying or whatever area you choose to focus on will be around in five years. There is so much road kill littering the Information Super Highway that it isn’t hard to begin to list the names of once high flying, promising tech apps, philosophies, businesses, and technologies.

For example, I’ve been a web professional since 1995. The first sites I did were done completely in Notepad. There were no editors at the time. I think Photoshop was in version 4 or 5. People were using the Magellan Browser and Netscape was brand new. It was really primitive. Since then I’ve had to learn UNIX, LINUX, Windows, Mac, HTML, JavaScript, Cold Fusion, Perl, PHP, MySQL, SQL, CSS, XHTML, XML, Actionscript. I’ve had to learn about SMTP, HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP, IPSec, SEO, Ecommerce and some Cryptography. I’ve seen the rise and fall of Napster, AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Pets.com, WebVan.com, theGlobe.com, Yahoo, Magazines, Newspapers, the Music business, the Movie business, Network TV, Cable TV, Radio, and the list goes on and on and on.

Look at Apple as a prime example of change. They started as a PC maker, almost went the way of the dinosaur, came back and now they make the majority of their money with consumer electronics melding computers into everyday devices. Microsoft, the once unbeatable Goliath is now struggling to keep its position because of the new Goliath, Google. Google is trying to stay on top by buying every hot upstart it can get it’s hands on that could possibly circumvent it’s strangle hold on the internet. Twitter and other social networking sites like FaceBook can drive traffic to websites without users having to kiss Google ass for search engine positioning. Twitter is the hottest thing on the net, has millions of users but has yet to make a dime for its investors.

This has been the past and is the present. It is total insanity. Technology was supposed to make life better. Is it? And this question is coming from a technology person!

Usually the same person that said he missed the boat will also ask me where I think we’re going in the future. My reply is always, “I don’t want to know.”