Now that I have two laptops that don’t talk to each other (politically), I have every reason to not take my desktop apps for granted. I still swear by some awesome apps like Adobe Lightroom and less awesome apps like Microsoft Office (meh) that I use to get stuff done, but seriously the Internet is the new Workstation.
Why? Because I don’t play games anymore.
Games was the single most reason I wanted to get a hardcore workstation. I’d call it a playstation but that’s already been taken. But back when I was a college student, I didn’t have enough money to keep up with new games so I gave up and decided to play with the Internets instead.
Today, I live on the Internets. I move from one place to another. In fact, today, I told some Facebook people that I wasn’t living on Facebook so much anymore. I was trying to be nice, and I was hinting at nicer places on the Internets compared to Facebook.
When new technologies change, people change along with it. You can’t control the way people change their tech habits, but it’s important to understand why it happens. Thus, when we build for user experiences, we’ll need to take this into account, because we’re ultimately designing solutions to support the habits that people have grown accustomed to.
While it’s easy to assume the ubiquity of email, the slickness of the iphone, and the power of the internet, there are occasions when those technologies will fail – and this is why we shouldn’t grow too fond of them, lest we become victims of our own devices.