PC, Internet, Mobile: Who will be the king of the new era?

It is interesting to review the history of the human information age at the end of 2014. Since the beginning of the early 80, the information process of human society has undergone three major stages--pc, Internet, mobile, if the Chinese population of the age to divide, also just represent the whenever, after three years of age. These three stages have different historical characteristics and different Overlord kings, but at the same time, each stage has some commonness, with these commonalities to observe three historical period of change, perhaps can find some clues to the future development.

At each stage, these commonalities affect the human race:

Product form

Operating

Productivity tools

Communication tools

PC era: from "hard" to "soft"

August 12, 1981 is a historic day, the day IBM officially released IBM PC. This computer is equipped with the Intel 8088 processor to run Microsoft's DOS1.0 system. Even before that, there was already a wide variety of personal computers on the market, including Apple machines, trs–80 machines, Japanese pc–9801 machines, which relied on a different architecture or platform and could not be compatible on hardware and software.

17 months later, Compaq Company reverse engineering IBM PC BIOS. The blue giant has disclosed all the technical information except the BIOS, and used its industry influence to form the "open standard" of the personal computer so that the standard parts of different manufacturers can be interchangeable. The "open standards" all of a sudden gathered a large number of hardware manufacturers, the formation of the personal computer industry chain, but also formally announced the Human PC (PC) era.

The corresponding to the hardware is software innovation. With a large number of IBM-compatible machines, Microsoft's operating system quickly occupied the entire market, while Apple's Mac computer, which had preferred access to the market and some technology, was in full rout. The PC industry's operating system has ended in the 80 's.

PC-era killer productivity and communication tools also belong to Microsoft.

Taking productivity tools as an example, in the 80 's, people's demand for productivity was directly reflected in how to get machines to process data. There was a software hit named Lotus 1–2–3 that almost monopolized the spreadsheet field. But Microsoft quickly caught up, and by the end of 90, Microsoft's Office suite became the industry standard for Office software, a leading position that continued until now.

E-mail is a killer communication tool in the PC era, and Microsoft's dominance is equally unchallenged. In the 1993, after capturing the operating system and Office software, Microsoft further created a complete set of e-mail services for the Enterprise exchange. Even now, many companies in the world's top 500 are still using Microsoft's Exchange service.

PC ERA since IBM, Microsoft has monopolized almost all software areas and used the operating system to control hardware manufacturers. This may be a lot of whenever to Microsoft with a complex emotion, that era, you really can not live without Microsoft.

The Internet age: The new king Superior

If you have to make a time tag for the internet age, August 9, 1995, the Netscape browser may be a good listing. This day, according to the last PC age 13 years, and the World Wide Web protocol has been released four years.

The Internet age product form is the browser, the browser "operating system" war is the browser battle. More accurately, it was the Battle of Netscape's browser with Microsoft IE.

This is a battle destined to go down in history. At first, Netscape's browser was an absolute advantage; Microsoft then created Internet Explorer to carry it in the Windows Plus System; Three months later, IE announced a free, charged Netscape browser under great pressure; 1997, IE 4.0 released, technically announced defeat Netscape.

During this period, Microsoft's most criticized place is that it abuses in the operating system, Office software and e-mail monopoly Advantage, strong promotion of IE browser, such as requiring OEM manufacturers must put the IE icon on the new computer desktop, using FrontPage Web design software, add non-standard tags, Make the Web page only suitable for IE browser display.

At the end of 1998, IE won the full victory of the browser war.

Browsers, however, are not the biggest innovations in the internet age. For many people, the internet age is a huge amount of information that humans cannot afford, and for the first time in human history, the dilemma of dealing with so much information. It wasn't until Google's appearance that we solved the problem of finding information in part. The search engine becomes the killer productivity application in the Internet age, also is favored by the capital market.

August 2004, Google listed, a year later, more understand the Chinese Baidu listing.

Facebook, founded in 2006 in Harvard dorm, became a killer communication product in the Internet age. Unlike traditional emails, however, Facebook does not really allow you to talk directly to an acquaintance or stranger, but rather to "connect" with different people. With more people on the Internet, and more people connected to Facebook, this "connection" allows social networking to enter a new era of "One-to-many" from "one-on-one", while making every user a "center" of social networking.

Mobile era: Scuffle continues

The timing of the mobile era seems a bit difficult. It could be 2005 when Google bought the Android team and started the mobile phone project, or January 2007, when Jobs released his first iphone. If let me choose, I will still choose the latter. After all, Jobs ' apple first defined the product shape of the mobile age: Smartphones. Nokia, Palm and BlackBerry have been plowing for years, but until the iphone revolutionized innovation: multi-touch, high-speed Internet connectivity and the subsequent app store really brought the mobile era.

Unlike the previous two, no one has won the mobile operating system so far. Like the PC era, Apple was the first to enter the market and occupy a big advantage. and Android with free open source policy, attract a large number of OEM manufacturers to join, the ecological circle is getting bigger. For now, the two operating systems are almost evenly split. As Apple releases two large-screen handsets, leading to the loss of high-end Android users who are partly concerned about the size of the screen, Android has a strong growth capability in developing countries, and these two levels of competition will continue.

Similarly, disruptive productivity and communication applications in the mobile age are not really available, but this does not preclude our bold predictions.

If the PC is a all-inclusive product and the Internet is an omniscient knowledge base, then mobile devices should probably be computing and connecting everywhere. With the help of mobile devices, especially smartphones, the connections of human society have become extremely tight. This also determines that the mobile age killer productivity application should be to communicate the human line two of the world's products.

May be Uber, Airbnb this kind of hot products. They use data to reconstruct trust between people and show this potential connection through mobile programs. This seemingly low-tech company is precisely the beginning of technology to bring human society back to its roots. Today, Uber's valuation has reached $41 billion trillion, and Airbnb has nearly 20 billion dollars.

The most likely communication tool in the mobile age is mobile communication products. Yes, such as micro-letter, line, WhatsApp. There may be many reasons for this, in my view, the first is the natural needs of human society, in the PC era, the internet era, the mobile era, the media from the desktop to the mobile end, and secondly, Mobile is the desktop computing Revolution in the 2.0 era, bringing more popular popularization, such as the micro-letter group has a large group is not to use a PC or even chat QQ part of the people-but they play in the micro-letter very smoothly.

There is no doubt that the Giants are eyeing the market. Facebook launched its own Facebook Messageer, a 22 billion-dollar takeover of Whatsapp;google's hantsout overhaul, and the cost of launching a free voice phone service ...

Post-Mobile Age: Who's the chance?

Competition in the mobile era will no doubt lead to the next era, since the first generation of the iphone released to now, the human mobile journey is about to enter the eighth year, it seems that the old and new era is coming.

From the hardware configuration, wearable equipment is the most topical product of the past few years. Apple's watch, which is due to be released early in 2015, is highly anticipated by many, and from the information currently available, Apple Watch is really cool, but it does not really solve some of the problems of wearable equipment and can not bring about the revolutionary development of wearable equipment.

From the point of view of network protocol, the Bitcoin protocol is very subversive. From a historical point of view, according to the "PC (device)-Internet (protocol)-smart phone (device)" law, the next stage seems to be the Bitcoin agreement. We certainly cannot be so judgmental, but it is undeniable that the subversion of the Bitcoin protocol not only changes the way money operates in the internet world, it is also changing the way new generations of applications are constructed.

Not long ago, when I published an article in Titanium media that analyzed the revival of Apple's Mac computer (see "This is the reason for the contrarian growth" of Mac), the rise of the internet gave Mac a new chance-because a lot of internet-based apps made the difference between operating systems irrelevant. Similarly, what is the difference between the so-called iOS or Android when mobile apps are becoming more platform-like?

Previously, the platform app only existed in China's special mobile internet environment. Every app is all-encompassing, from life to work, to shelter, to job search. The most typical is the micro-letter, in a sense, an ordinary user simply open the micro-letter is enough to support his daily life. More importantly, micro-letters also have the potential to grow into an important distribution channel for apps, which has a lot in common with line thinking.

Uber is another potentially platform app. In order to call the car service into the market, Uber can become a real-time courier company, after the car, helicopters, private aircraft are also possible, and with the development of unmanned vehicle technology, future users through the Uber is likely to be a robot-controlled cars or aircraft or ships, In the end, Uber became a super node connecting people and everything in the physical world ... Behind all this is the data support, so the Super app will be of greater value.

Google offers an idea: Cross-platform platform. Chrome is its pawn, a 2008-born browser that has shouldered the mission of connecting the old and new two Google from the start-extending Google's desktop edge to the Mobile world, but as I said in a previous article, because of the closed nature of mobile apps, Google's search engine in the Mobile world is getting smaller, and the cross-platform nature of chrome is becoming more important-from Windows, OS x to Android, Ios,chrome can provide an almost integrated experience. Next, Chrome's platform is again inevitable, similar to the current desktop Chrome browser Web applications.

Like entering the mobile age, PC, the internet will not disappear, as in the post-mobile era, a variety of "old" computing devices will remain and affect human life, but these technologies or devices have become infrastructure, the new era of killer products, operating systems or applications are based on these infrastructure growth and development.

2014 is about to become a history, perhaps the great curtain of the post-mobile era will be slowly opened in 2015 ...

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)