Ambient Findability

It's interesting to see how Peter Morville's post "Ambient Findability" rides the line between sounding both dated and prescient. On the one hand, he mentions emerging technologies that have yet to reach the mass consumer (e.g. "smart dust" and "personal fabricators") while typing from his "Dell C400". The 2002 post date is certainly the biggest example of that fact.

Nevertheless, the hope that we'd move "beyond Google" still seems to be of paramount concern, although for different reasons. The size of the company and its dipping into other avenues has created a situation not unlike that of Microsoft in the early and mid-90's. He's certainly right that users still get frustrated with search results, a concept that I've certainly been relaying to my students when we discuss research. Even more on point is his prediction of the prevalence of metadata and RF tags, which have become extremely prominent in recent years (QR codes are another relatable example).

The most interesting thing that I've found is implied within his statements on his "frugality"-we've seen that many PC manufacturers have abandoned the high-end/high-performance market in favor of budget PC's, with netbooks being the best example of that. Of current niche PC manufacturers, only Falcon Northwest, Alienware (now owned and semi-ruined by Dell), and Razer. The consumer push towards low-end (and I don't mean that in the pejorative) desktops and laptops has shaped how manufacturers aimed their R&D. I'd like to think that we'll be seeing more of a push upward in the upcoming years, but that's just a gut feeling on my part.