37 architecturalist papers: paradigm shifts are transitory

About 15 years ago, I met an Inktomi architect who said that the future of all computing was the cell phone. It was before the iPhone.

And I stared at him and his dorky phone, and I said to myself, “nope.”

For 15 years, that was THE worst bet of all time.

But COVID changed all of that.

Mobility ground to a halt. And more importantly, the emergence of a whole slew of technologies called into question the value of physical mobility.

And then got me thinking about the future of mobile computing.

Mobile computing intends to allow the person to go anywhere with their computing device.

That was the paradigm.

But what if the paradigm shifts a little bit, that mobile computing is about letting the person be present anywhere without physically being there.

I like to follow mobile apps as proof points of a thesis.

For example, before Covid, Doordash’s desktop features lagged their mobile devices. It has since changed.

The simplistic answer is that people are at home more and in front of a computer more.

But that’s not satisfying.

What if, instead, more people had more computers? And had created places to work at home that allowed them to use their computers more?

In that case, more people would stop carrying their phones with them and use them to do work stuff. Instead, they would go to their workspace and do their work stuff there.

So?

In that case, technologies that improve our ability to be present are more important than technologies that allow us to carry our computers with us.

And that mobile computing and battery life, the dominant trend and a perceived inevitable future, was just technology that accommodated the previous paradigm, well.

My point in this discussion wasn’t to focus on COVID. My point was to focus on how paradigm shifts can occur.

And that assumptions about the inevitability of anything are usually wrong.

Tying this back to strategic architecture, this falls into my general thesis that the role of a technologist who owns a portfolio of technologies is to recognize that things fall out of fashion. That when they do, it is tempting to call them dead. It is also tempting to ignore things that are in fashion and call them a fad. Instead, we need to keep our eye out for trends that change and then think through all of the implications.

And that if you are leading a broad enough portfolio of products, the strategy of how to navigate that shift is very important.