I see things shifting

Washing my car this weekend it suddenly occurred to me that things are changing, or better said shifting. First of all websites are now officially no longer part of new media. I don’t know when it happened but I am convinced it did. Where once we would promise companies that they would have a fast (instant, wasn’t it?) way of communicating with their clients, I now work for clients with bulky websites, not with some pages that don’t get updated often, but with only some pages that do get updated once in a while. I still need to think about the reasons, but I believe ‘not having much to say’ and ‘not knowing what clients might find interesting’ might be one of the important root causes.

The reality of web-getting-traditional is all the more striking while I am engaging in a number of mobile projects. I cannot help but feel that what we are up against feels very much like 10 years ago, all over again ( yes indeed, I have been around THAT long).

If I were a new company or a company that never really made the shift to a ‘decent’ website, I wouldn’t even bother anymore. I find myself visiting quite a number of mobile sites from my laptop, they give me the information and tasks I need, without the tremendous clutter most websites throw in.

Thinking about that brought me to another shift. Where once the laptop promised us to become our computer to take along anywhere (that was when ‘mobile’ was still an adjective), it turns out to be nothing more than a desktop with more than one desk. Or when was the last time you had your laptop on your lap? Most people’s laptop only has one desk. And what has the desktop become? It has turned into a sort of home-server where things are stored, administration documents, terrabytes of photos, music libraries, etc. And it is hooked to all those devices you really don’t carry around, printer, scanner etc. Or if the desktop didn’t upgrade to home-server, it became the madly chaotic and crowded kids’ computer.

And then the word mobile turned into a noun! And mobile comes in two flavours. That thing which really sits comfortably on your lap and that other thing that fits in your pocket and you can walk around with (no, not in a womans pocket, but in most purses it does). Tablets and smart phones that connect anytime and anyhow, that don’t take time to wake up, that have batteries which don’t let you down within the time of your train-trip to work, with quite some free software that is actually useful (imagine that) and other software which is so cheap you don’t really think about it twice and with browsers that will make surfing quite a new kind of experience (oops, was that a negative that slipped in?).

I like my new playground and there is quite some work ahead.