The Future is a Hybrid
tl;dr — In short, no one product paradigm usually wins and takes all — and that’s a good thing. That means our future is dynamic and allows for self-correction.
When predicting the future, publicists love to pander discrete tenets and ideologies.
Cloud.
De-centralization.
Mobile.
Remote.
Touchless.
These are among some of the most publicized doctrines of the last decade in web tech.
In reality, the future has always played out to be a bit of a fusion of doctrines.
Thus, it behooves us to contemplate a hybrid future.
The Server-Client vs. Host-Terminal Debate
Before the 80s, the industrial norm for computing was to have terminals connect to giant mainframe hosts that cost millions of dollars apiece.
Back then, people didn’t have computers, they had terminals.
For those who have never used a terminal, think of it as a connected screen with keyboard inputs used to connect and operate a remote computer, which in this case is the mainframe computer. In other words, terminals don’t really run their own programs on premises, they show you what is being executed on a computer elsewhere.
That, was what was thought of as the norm of computing back then.
The debate in the 70s and 80s was whether the future of computing is one with a centralized computing node (like a mainframe) with terminals, or one where computing is distributed among a network of smaller computers, each capable of executing code.
After the mid-70s, personal computers, or simply, “computers” colloquially, developed as a new trend. At the time, the big mainframe players like IBM and the Seven Dwarfs on the east coast, sneered at the impracticality of personal computers and considered them transient fad that’ll eventually die off.
Having gotten the shaft, companies who espoused the personal computer doctrine migrated westward. Modern household names like Intel, Apple and Microsoft are among these companies that kicked off the personal computer (or the “micro-computer”) revolution.
And you probably guessed it, the movement became the tech industry we know today. One coalesced around Silicon Valley, or the San Francisco Bay Area to be more precise.
Well, the fact that you’re reading this article on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet or a phone. It is obvious how the revolution played out.
But, the future turned out to be hybrid.
Yes, personal computers became the norm among consumers.
But mainframes didn’t exactly die out. They are still being used in high intensity computing environments in financial computing, scientific research, and in military applications. IBM still sells them.
It’s just that mainframes had to adapt to a world where they are no longer a center of the universe, they now share the universe with a vast swarm of personal computers that handle most of the computing load of the modern world.
Handheld Mobile Revolution
No, iPhones are not the first smartphones.
The first consumer handheld computing devices date back more than two decades before the iPhone’s release in 2007. One of the first consumer-ready devices is Apple’s ill-fated Newton, the development of which started back in 1987.
Back then these handheld computing devices were called PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). They were not connected (well, Internet wasn’t quite a thing among consumers yet) and their battery lives were abysmal.
The first company and product line to get PDAs right, are arguably Palm Computing. It was the first to dominate the commercial market, making devices for working professionals to stay organized on-the-go.
Then came BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. From 1997 until around 2006, the three are the major PDA players, with Palm and Microsoft commanding more than 30% of the market each.
With the evolution of cell network connectivity, PDAs with cell connectivity got rebranded as Data Phones. And after 2007, the release of iOS and Android devices prompted another rebranding to Smart Phones.
The mobile computing debate around the 2000s was whether mobile devices will stay true to their PDA narrative and remain a connected extension of personal computers? or will mobile computing become powerful enough to replace personal computers?
Again, the future is hybrid. Both happened.
Today, more consumers use mobile phones and tablets than personal computers. In a way, mobile computing gobbled up more than half of the personal computer market.
Productivity software suites like Microsoft Office and creative software suites like Adobe Creative Cloud, have migrated to tablets in favor of a work-anywhere mantra popular among millennial working professionals.
Gaming on mobile phones and tablets have overtaken PC gaming by huge margins.
But that didn’t exactly kill personal computers.
What happened is that with the advent of mobile computing, personal computers, much like mainframes before it, became more specialized.
PC traffic still have an edge over mobile traffic in that PC traffic has on average double the conversion rate, half the bounce rate and also longer browsing time.
Which makes sense, right?
Consumers value speed and convenience while on mobile devices, and that leaves the more involved interactions with information and more sophisticated decision-making to PCs.
In a nutshell, if we were to bet on a doctrine taking all and the other doctrine failing utterly, then we would’ve missed out on real, nuanced opportunities in a hybrid future.
