flynn23 wrote:
] I do think that there are new tools all the time. But the bulk
] of what the industry delivers is just repackaged from 1988.

I agree with what you wrote. But there is a subtlety missing to
the original essay -- I memed it without time to talk about it.
Some more thoughts.

User Experience
If you look at the hot developments of the last year, they really
boil down to user interface. Obvious examples of this include the
stuff that Google has put out. Maps.Google -- especially the super
hot "satellite images" -- this is not new. Remember Terraserver?
Satellite images are not new, but the interface is so simple and
responsive that people are experimenting. And the assistant next
door wanted to show me some cool pictures. Same with gmail. Same
with flickr. Photo sharing is not new, group photosharing is not
new, database tagging of images, even, not new. I remember when I
went to the Galapagos in 2000 I tried to tag all of my pictures.
Failed. Now I could do it easily.

That's what you'd miss if we had seen OS X in 1988. The subtle
user experience tips that make it easier, better.

Where are my flying cars?
Speech recognition is a good case of where the development realities
have lagged expections. And part of that is because they must. Our
expectations of speech recognition continue to increase every time
we get close. Dragon Dictate, for example, was phenominal for
dictation -- if you trained it, and spoke in clipped words. When
speech recognition was first proposed, that would have been amazing;
by the time it became possible, expections were raised toward no
training, multiple users, multiple languages, continuous talk.
Flying cars aren't coming not because of technology issues, but
regulatory and infrastructure problems, and raised expectations;
I want a flying car without having to have a private pilot's license
and training and upkeep requirements.

Moore's Law of Users
The real issue is the users. We don't want the thing that beats
spreadsheets, because we're comfortable with them. What people
expect from their excel experience is drastically different from
their visicalc experience, but its all still on a metaphor from
actual ledgers we've used for hundreds of years. There are really
few things that we expect to do on a computer that wasn't
obvious to the superwellconnected in 1988: graphics, communication,
etc. The surprises are all in the things that weren't being
speculated about. The software innovations that were unexpected
are in places like cell phones.

I am writing applications for my blackberry. Imagine if someone
in 1988 had walked up to you with a smartphone connected to a
time-shifted GPRS network: here, this box that's about the size of
your mouse -- I can send instant messages around the world, look
up information anywhere I want, and run programs far more sophisticated than your mac can handle. In a box that's the size
of your mouse, and anywhere in the world. That would have blown
anyone's mind.

Remember how exciting the Mac Portable was?
(late 1989, http://www.lowendmac.com/pb/portable.shtml)

RE: The New Paradigm of Tools