I love the mountains in Utah—the arch is an astonishing natural construction. I love the whoosh of the ocean crashing on the rocks. Have you stopped to think about the tiny things—the green of moss thickly layered over rock veined with turquoise?
I always wonder—if I lived nearby would it pale with frequency? Would the rush of my days take over my perception of awe? Would the thoughts in my mind of have to’s and should have’s and must do’s blind me from miracle?
Do you remember a world without WYSIWYG? Do you remember putting in codes to indirectly say “make this bold?” And do you remember the first rush of moving around paragraphs directly?
Or better yet—think about cut and paste. When I was in college it literally meant CUT with scissors and TAPE into the right place—and COPY to make it look good. Cut and paste, along with delete, utterly transformed the way we construct documents today. We start with something we have—we move things in and out—we delete, we change—and presto, it’s a new creation.
If I try I can feel the frustration of early email. I could send you a note (sort of like SMS) but I could not send you a document. Real collaboration and coordination could not happen simply because we couldn’t send around the file with the right file format. But now we can! Amazing. Email became the center of business work. Was it mainly because of real file sharing? Now we are driven mad because we can’t send larger and larger files easily, and junk in the email, and too much communication.
My mother told stories of the ice man—and I mean the ice man because they had an ice box. Today, we have refrigerators and we don’t need the ice man anymore.
Technology creates miracles big and small over and over and over—but as soon as we have it we expect more and more and more.
Users of technology don’t care what miracles we give them—they take it all for granted—that is why we go cool on the “cool” products of yesterday. And that is why success is about being one step ahead; understanding not just where we need to go now but what will be expected such a short time later.
Watch this video. It will indeed remind you of the amazing revelations that are ongoing. And you’ll laugh too.