.Dust

Yes­ter­day night I was sit­ting on the sofa read­ing the March issue of the wired magazine.

One of the most inter­est­ing arti­cle was one titled “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Busi­ness”.

Cit­ing the arti­cle, this is an inter­est­ing passage:

Forty years ago, Cal­tech pro­fes­sor Carver Mead iden­ti­fied the corol­lary to Moore’s law of ever-​increasing com­put­ing power. Every 18 months, Mead observed, the price of a tran­sis­tor would halve. And so it did, going from tens of dol­lars in the 1960s to approx­i­mately 0.000001 cent today for each of the tran­sis­tors in Intel’s lat­est quad-​core. This, Mead real­ized, meant that we should start to “waste” transistors.

As explained in the arti­cle with the sen­tence “waste tran­sis­tors” pro­fes­sor Mead wanted to say that in early times of the com­puter his­tory hard­ware was very expen­sive and lim­ited. Pro­gram­mers had to be very clever in order to save any pos­si­ble bit con­cen­trat­ing more on mak­ing their pro­gram­ming task effi­cient and as ligh as pos­si­ble. This led to great atten­tion on how tasks were imple­mented and no atten­tion at all at how the user would inter­act with the machine.

When hard­ware price finally dropped, pro­gram­mers could con­cen­trate more on the user inter­face side being sure that the machine their appli­ca­tions were run­ning on were fast enough.

This finally brought to mar­ket the hard­ware and inter­faces we know today.

I think that the same story can be applied to Mobile Phones.

When mobile phone were born they were run­ning on non really capa­ble micro­proces­sor. Pro­gram­mers had to cope with these lim­i­ta­tion and focus more on accom­plish­ing the mis­sion of design­ing a work­ing device than deliv­er­ing an eye candy user inter­face or applications.

Basi­cally in the early stage of the mobile tech­nol­ogy the only thing the phone had to do was allow­ing the cus­tomer to make a phone call.

Nowa­days we can find on the mar­ket mobile phone that have the very same com­put­ing power of not so old per­sonal computers.

I think it is def­i­nitely time to “Waste tran­sis­tors” also on mobile phones.

Related posts:

1. Why Do Not We Stop Stuff­ing Mobile Phones?
2. Device mor­ph­ing
3. Bat­tery killed the Mobile Inter­net star
4. Your Mobile Phone Is Talk­ing To A White Cube
5. The iPhone Effect