Posted by Lorenzo Wood October 21st, 2010
Apple’s latest announcements show it continuing down the path we predicted back in January by bringing to the Mac desktop many iOS features including the app store and “full screen” apps. We have been discussing with some of our clients how apps represent a major change in public perception far beyond mobile, and what further changes are in store.
Sci-fi to software to sites — the three ages of public perception of computers
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the word “computer” entered public consciousness to mean a giant brain owned by corporations and governments and run by bespectacled men in white coats. Beginning in the late 1970s more people came across desktop computers (“microcomputers”) in a business context. Many of those were Apple IIs, Apple’s first commercial success that provided it with the money to create the original Mac. And many of those Apple IIs were bought to run the first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc. Understanding these new “computers” involved new words: programs, software, applications. These were the things that made computers useful.
From the mid-1990s there was an explosion in computer use, particularly at home, which roughly coincided with the explosion of public access to the Internet. As a result, for most of the public, almost everything important on computers was a Web site (1). As much as the industry invented new words (“portal”, “aggregator”, “(Web) application” and so on), for the general public everything was just a Web site.
“Site” as a metaphor
The word “site” is a metaphor in many languages. A site is a place: a building site, the site of an event. A site has some well-understood properties:
- It’s big
- It’s owned by someone else
- It exists somewhere else
- I visit it, then I leave
- I find my way around in it
- When I’m not there, other people are
- When I go there, It might be closed
- When I’m there, I’m not at home, so I’m on my guard
- When I’m there, I keep my kids where I can see them
- To visit it, I have to find its address
All of these apply to Web sites. A lucky choice of word, or determinism? Doesn’t matter: the digital world today is built on these perceptions.
The fourth age — the age of apps
Over the last two years we’ve seen a huge rise in the mobile Internet. As successful as it is, Apple’s iPhone does not account for this on its own. However, it has catalysed public perception, and we have seen well over a year of public expectation of mobile being driven by awareness of the iPhone and apps, regardless of the kind of phones people have. This has created a “rush to apps”, with every mobile manufacturer creating (or just re-naming) apps and app stores.
But this change is not limited to mobile.
“App” does not have real-world connotations like “site”. The mobile experience and Apple’s own marketing provide the anchor for public expectation. An app has properties such as:
- It’s small (obviously — it fits inside my phone; even the word is small)
- I put it there (so it’s mine)
- I can take it away
- I go to a store to get it
- Because it’s small, it doesn’t do very much
- It does what it does well so I choose to keep it
- I choose where to put it
- I can get at it easily
- It always works
- It’s fast
- I give it permission to be here
Why the rush to apps? Because these properties seem to resonate with the public.
As we noted in January, and as we’re continuing to see today, Apple’s model has a natural trajectory to the desktop. Last May Google announced its intention to introduce an app store into its Web browser, Chrome — in which the “apps”, it takes pains to point out, are just Web sites that you could visit in the traditional way.
Google’s move emphasises that this is not a technology turf war. The a-word is increasingly widespread, but understanding of how an app is delivered is not. Nor is it a battle of open vs. closed, as Chris Anderson’s Wired leader The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet. suggests.
What we are seeing is the early stages of a fourth age of public perception of computers, in which the high-level properties of apps shape more of people’s initial interactions with computing devices of all kinds.
What next steps along this path can we see?
What if my apps are the same, everywhere? Today, if I have an iPhone and an iPad I can put some of the same apps on both, and apps bought from the Mac app store are licensed for “all my personal Macs”. I put some care into the arrangement of those apps — how they’re grouped, which are more prominent. What happens when I can get at the same app collection from every device from tiny mobile to wall-sized TV? How much more care do I invest in curating that environment for myself? How much of it do I expose? What does it say about me?
What permission do my apps have to peek? There is much discussion about privacy on the Web and who owns data about whom. But apps are (perceptually, at least) “mine”, and I carry them with me. Does that give them more permission to react to my circumstances? Does how I place them in my environment communicate that permission? Does putting the eBay app on the same home screen as the Facebook app give the Facebook app permission to know what I’m buying and selling on eBay?
What if apps can participate in searches?. Part of the “Web site age” is an understanding of a search to mean putting a word or two into a search engine (which is a Web site) and getting some sites to look at. iOS includes Spotlight, with which I can search through mail messages, contacts, appointments and the names of my apps on the device. What if the apps I’ve chosen are invited to respond to searches too? Does my positioning of them confer different priority on the results? How do they deliver the results? Are they consolidated or do I need to look inside each app to see them. And if 85% of Web journeys today start with a (Web) search, what will such a change do to the dynamics of Web use?
Predicting which technologies will win and lose has always been very difficult. Underlying trends are much more stable. Many big companies over the last decade have been going through major changes to exploit the Web site age. We expect the changes to exploit the age of apps to be as fundamental.
- Of course, “software” did not go away as a concept — the games market and the huge success of Microsoft Office are just two examples. This co-existence is a common pattern in the evolution of technology — David Egerton’s Shock Of The Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 is a good read on this subject.
Tags: app, apple, behaviour, Google, Lorenzo Wood, Opinion, society, Technology
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