Wonderful use of data and speculation to determine that the next Revolutionary User Interface is here

Revolutionary User Interfaces
[Via asymco]

A few years ago, around the middle of the last decade, the mobile phone market was characterized by the rivalry between a few established vendors. These were Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. These incumbent companies had a broad portfolio of devices including smartphones and feature phones and basic phones. Many also sold networking equipment and were deeply engaged with their customers, network operators.

There was also a set of entrants who offered only smartphones.  They were quirky. HTC was a a prominent “ODM” or original design manufacturer who built phones for companies who added their brands and sold and supported the product. HTC made phones and PDAs for operator brands and for some large PC companies. It also began to sell phones under its own brand. RIM was also offering products that had evolved from pagers into email appliances with added voice capabilities. But RIM’s products were not very good as phones. Voice was so poorly integrated that many people carried both a BlackBerry and a voice phone. Then there was Palm with something called a Treo which promised many things but did not quite deliver.

In 2007 something happened which changed the industry. It took a few years to even realize it was happening but by the time it was obvious, it had changed to such a degree that huge companies found themselves in financial distress. This chart illustrates the effect.

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Please read the whole article. I thought it would be another “Apple is disrupting the whole industry” article again but it is so much more.

It is attempting to show that the really disruptive aspects of our digital world come from new ways of interacting with the technology. From the mouse to the click wheel to touch, each device added to our ability to interact with technology and disrupted the  industries that were not using that interface.

The phone industry was killed by the addition of touch.

Could the entire technology industry be disrupted by Siri? The author makes a good case. I agree.

Siri-type ways of interacting with a digital device have been a dream since Star Trek. Now Apple can put it in everything.

And no one has anything similar that is as robust. Could TV be what Apple disrupts next?

Amazon continues to disrupt the book industry

by shutterhacks

Kindle Library Launches for Amazon Prime Members
[Via American Times]

With the launch of a new library service, Amazon is changing the e-book market forever.

If you happen to own a Kindle and if you belong to Amazon’s Prime service, you’re in luck. Not only will the $79/year service get you free 2-day shipping and access to thousands of streaming movies and television shows at Amazon Video, now you’ll be able to borrow e-books from the new Kindle library service Amazon is offering.

While the original launch of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is limited to around 5,000 titles, and while none of the top US publishers is participating yet, the move represents the first step in a shift toward subscription-based, rather than purchase-based, e-reading.

Kindle owners – you need the device, not just an app – can borrow one book at a time per month and hold on to that book until they want to borrow a second one.

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I’ve had Prime since the beginning because we buy a lot of stuff from Amazon and getting quicker delivery seemed a good price to pay.

My wife got a Kindle for her birthday. Now she can check out a book to read as an added bonus. And take as long to read it as possible.

There may not be a great choice right now but it is also likely that she’ll read books that she might not have paid for just to check out.

And may find some authors that she wold like to read more from and pay for.

This has the chance of being a win-win for everyone – except maybe the book publishers whose business models are still stuck in the 1950s.