At 15 minutes long, the talk is just worth going to watch all the way through. He makes 6 key points:
- Windows (really Desktop) is dead
- Index Search (Google) is dead (instead Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Apps will beat the Web
- HTML5 changes everything (really end of Google commoditizing all content)
- Tablets will win big (iPad has no valid competitors)
- Social is a sideshow (Facebook won)
I think point 1 is pretty obvious. Most people will not use a desktop for most of their time on a computer.
Point 2 is interesting and the justification is that search makes up much less of interaction when people use mobile devices and then referring to point 1. Instead people increasingly use apps which use a combination of domain knowledge and context—Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc.—to do better.
Points 3 and 4 were muddled, but basically amount to saying that people will start to really differentiate content using HTML5 apps to become something more than “just the result of a Google search.”
Point 5 is something that I’m not sure I agree with. It’s entirely possible that we’ll pick up screens that look like tablets while we’re on the couch, but I think we’re rapidly moving to a world where we carry around a phone-like device which projects itself onto the other devices that happen to be near us at the time—including, possibly, tablet-like screens. In that world, the iPad isn’t really relevant. It’s just a screen.
Point 6 seems spot on. Facebook more or less won and covers enough of the space where social really matters that it’s hard for me to imagine the parts of my life that still need to be social-ized.
