Asymmetry
The tech world of today is somewhat locked in a struggle of ideal versus available. And, “available” tends to illustrate the limiting factor of some awful, inefficient, regulated monopoly/oligopoly like the cellular phone industry.
I could bang the cell phone drum all day to illustrate this. People are employing a fairly sophisticated wireless personal area network technology (Bluetooth) to very slowly transfer files and music between computer and cellphone, principally because USB cables for phones run something like $20 for the proprietary connector and a flimsy stack of software, probably on one of those annoying little CDs that jam a MacBook if you feed them into the drive.
People expend a lot of effort and money to convert good things into bad things to make these various piles of locked-in crap work on a semi-acceptable basis. This product should not exist, for example. This converts a perfectly good 802.11 wireless internet connection into a cruddy 3G signal that allows an AT&T phone to have voice service in a poorly-covered area.
This is something like rigging up a distillery to extract the water out of a bottle of Coca Cola to feed into a double-boiler that produces a sugar syrup used to make some kind of dangerous, methanol-laden bathtub RC Cola. Which you then pour onto your flower garden to water your plants.
If there was justice and reason in the world, a cell phone wouldn’t particularly care what network it was using (be it a nice 802.11 network or a so-so 3G network). It would just fire up Voice Over IP and make the call, at some fine-tuned quality depending on the connection quality. The concept of “voice” and “data” is but an illusion in the digital world, and this is more and more true as we go. This is coming, but the cell industry is fighting it all the way. Because that luxury-priced $30 “unlimited” data plan add-on of yours will suddenly become a complete replacement for the $100 wireless bill.
A more flippant example might be those ridiculous $30 “iCable”-type things they sell at Best Buy (right next to the Monster Cable 1 Jigawatt surge protectors) to patch your audio to your car in style (meaning, color-matching iPod-white cabling). The same cable can be bought at a more reasonable 200% markup at RadioShack for a mere $5, if you can deal with the pedestrian home stereo black styling.
It’s amazing to think about those cassette form-factor audio line-out adapters that were so popular when the Discman models were first coming out. Well, at least once they made the anti-skip models. These things were a work of art (they didn’t really work all that well… but still). They converted a headphone-out signal into whatever magnetic characteristic a tape deck picks up off an audio tape, which then fed into the car stereo so you could get the Discman output into the car speakers.
This was an early example of modern technological asymmetry. It was so expensive to install a CD player into a car that it was cheaper to buy a portable player, a cigarette lighter power adapter, and one of these venerable tape deck adapters… and monkey them all together.
Fast forward to now, where Ford, and now everybody else, is selling cars based on having a line-in 1⁄8” jack on the front of the car radio. This is the Russian’s pencil to NASA’s zero-gravity pen. The engineer who devised that elegant little tape adapter could have saved all that time if they just put a jack on the front of the radios. And, in many cases, radios (especially aftermarket ones) have this input capability, but on the back side of the unit. All those years…
Of course, why provide a jack that makes the pricey CD player upgrade less relevant? Oligopoly strikes again. It took the iPod to finally wipe out this resistance.
Users are employing all this new technology against the traditionally locked-in enablers of that technology. This may be why “disruptive” is becoming such a buzzword in research and product promotion.
Android is getting ready to obsolete traditional wireless voice calling, search engines obsoleted desk-set encyclopedias, Facebook obsoleted the phone book, and Twitter obsoleted the conventional stalker.
What will happen to the whining giants? I think mainly they will slowly be taken over by the government, stripped of their customer-facing profit motives, and become cost-plus infrastructure maintainers. In other words, AT&T will become something like a public utilities company.