As part of our breathtakingly romantic anniversary weekend, Cathy and I were talking today about all of the various types of digital storage devices we have actually used in our lives. I thought it would be a fun exercise at a conference, simply as a way of illustrating how rapidly technology changes while we’re not paying attention.
But stop for a moment and think: Right now, you’re probably using hard disks, CD- or DVR-ROMs and thumb drives for storage. You used to have Zip drives and streaming tape drives and flexi- and floppy-disks, but we are within a year or two of being rid of magnetic media altogether. Solid state hard disks will be hugely capacious, hugely fast, very secure and wicked cheap.
And then: What next?
It’s plausible to me that the next level of off-line digital storage will be the cloud itself — multiple, multiply-redundant, self-replicating, self-maintaining copies of your data, instantly accessible and virtually indestructible. I’m presuming the advent of Web 3.0, as well, but we are there already anyway.
I rank on Windows because it’s funny, but it doesn’t mean anything. In the cloud, Windows is a dead letter, and Apple only matters as a model of how to build elegant, functional software. The cloud is beyond operating systems, because, just as Web 2.0 is ideally browser-independent, Web 3.0 is operating system-independent. It will not matter how you address the cloud, since every way you have of doing that is simply a user interface — browser-, operating system- and device-independent.
This is why it is worthwhile for everyone — not just people in the real estate business — to think about the iPhone. It’s not a Mac OS computer, it’s the first strike at a universal remote control for cloud computing.
The ideal way to do forms on an iPhone (or any mobile device) is not by filling in the blanks on a PDF file, but, rather, filling in the blanks on a multi-page HTML form. The complete contract language could be there, in readable HTML, and the Realtor or lender could let the client type their own text fields and click their own check boxes. Only when the process is complete are the filled-in fields transferred to a standing PDF document (or to a document cast in type from scratch) and rendered in printable, transferrable form.
Everything that we do can — and should — be done in this way. We can’t be tied down by bulky, immovable hardware, and we can’t be tied down by data accessible only in certain locations. This is what will happen, and the vendors who survive the disruptive tsunami that the 3G iPhone will cause in every line of business will be the ones who work out ways to deliver their data in secure and convenient forms to any device the end-user prefers, anywhere on earth.
The cloud is the future. The vendors who won’t adapt to it are done for.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Deryk Harper says:
Try 3D molecular computing….read about this and other “hard to wrap your brain around” rapidly advancing information, bio and nano technology fusion in a great book by Ray Kurzweil called The Singularity is Near|When Humans Transcend Biology. It will change the way we all think, literally.
July 6, 2008 — 11:33 pm
Deryk Harper says:
Ooops..sorry about the duplicate post…fingers got ahead of me.
July 6, 2008 — 11:34 pm
John Rowles says:
I’m keeping an eye on Android, Google’s new open source mobile device OS. They already have Google Apps for mobile, and they won’t be tied to just one carrier. I’d already have an iPhone if it weren’t for the lock with AT&T.
July 7, 2008 — 6:28 am
Eileen Pettengill says:
Sounds like Vegas might have been a better alternative! 🙂
July 7, 2008 — 9:11 am
Greg Swann says:
> Sounds like Vegas might have been a better alternative!
Pillowtalk. I’m an INTJ, she’s an INTP. In Vegas, there probably would have been less EE/CS and more commercial real estate.
July 7, 2008 — 9:35 am
Brad Shaffer says:
I totally agree. As a first generation iPhone user I can’t help but wonder what the iPhone 3G and 2.0 iPhone Software will bring. With third-party applications set to launch this Friday, July 11, I will be curious to see what transpires for the real estate industry.
Companies that make products like RELAY and DocuSign should conceivably already jumped on the bus and started creating iPhone applications when the software developer’s kit came out earlier this year. However, with most things in real estate – we’ll probably have to wait a year before we even start to hear of anything.
I’ve searched online quite a bit and haven’t seen anything that will allow a true paperless transaction via an iPhone.
Your discussion on the cloud is also interesting. With Apple’s MobileMe service it allows all real estate professionals that ability to have true Exchange email solutions that will allow contact, calendar, email and photo synchronization without having to think about it. It’s always interesting to see Apple take something that’s been around and make it easy “for the rest of us.” If you notice, the MobileMe graphic design includes a nice, puffy, white cloud.
Web 2.0 is interesting enough and 3.0 will be here before we know it!
July 7, 2008 — 10:57 am
Todd Carpenter says:
I’ve been making the shift to the cloud for some months now. I use Google docs almost exclusively for my office needs. Plus tools like DropBox and Del.icio.us.
I have two computers that run on Linux, a laptop and a secondary desktop. Ubuntu Linux is nowhere near as elegant as OSX, but really, all I need to run is Firefox, almost everything else in the cloud. The only other program I run is OppenOffice.org’s presentation app and I store my presentations on that hard drive (the only docs saved on the hard drive). If there was a way to do presentation though a web app, I would use something like 280 Slides.
I’m getting an iPhone on Friday. I’m hoping it will be able to replace my laptop, but we’ll have to see. I’m going to try very hard to make it happen.
July 7, 2008 — 4:49 pm