The most interesting changes are those that seem to happen subliminally — not the ones announced in a press conference.
A classic example was the growth of text messaging. I was with a bunch of technology journalists talking to Orange in about 1995 when one of the Orange guys asked if we knew anything about SMS messages.
Not one of us knew that, in the nether reaches of the mobile phone instruction manuals of the day, there
was a facility to send short text messages to other phones. And SMS messaging didn't strike any of us as very interesting, either. Why would anyone need it when you could now actually speak to people by mobile phone? At best, SMS sounded boring, at worst, retrograde.
The Orange executive smiled and said we might be interested to know they had found their network was handling millions of these SMS messages each day. Their research suggested that teenagers, who had just started to get mobiles, had discovered SMS and were using it to communicate under the radar in school.
The development was almost organic, from the street upwards; Orange had done nothing to prompt it. And, tellingly, it was many years before 'texting' caught on in the US to anything like the extent that it was rampant in the UK. Texting still isn't as much part of the culture as it is in Britain.
Another widgety, seemingly pointless techie add-on that took off exponentially was the mobile phone camera. I was at the Sony Ericsson press launch of the first in the UK about ten years ago and, again, the consensus was that it was a gimmick, a quite bizarre mixing of fish and foul. Who would want a camera in their phone, we asked? Today, who wouldn't want one?
There's something subliminal going on now in technology that I find fascinating but, I sense, a lot of people haven't yet quite noticed. It started just two years ago this summer with iPhone apps, and, although everyone knows about them, the broader implications haven't hit home.
What's really happening is that software is beginning to be more important than hardware, which shows many signs of having plateaued for the time being. I've noticed that in the new product notifications I get, there's less that's new and more that's an upgrade of something already in existence.
When I read about a new product and say, "Wow," it's invariably a software innovation. Often it's a tiny app that will do something astonishing on my phone. I have one that lets me listen live as I'm walking down the street to any radio station in the world, another which streams every traffic camera in London, another still which speaks Chinese — and gets understood in China.
Other amazing software apps are monster suites so vast that they live on warehouse-sized servers thousands of miles away. And to gauge what is at the frontier of such mass-access, hyper-software apps, there's no better place to look than the more obscure corners of Google.com.
Google Street View, for instance, has improved to the level where it gives a real sensation of walking down a street in any one of hundreds of cities around the world. It's not far short of the kind of virtual reality technology we were promised 20 years ago.
Go into Google Translate and there's another astonishing demonstration of the ascendancy of software. You can (and if you don't believe it, just try), instantly translate a phrase or a whole piece of text from (say) English to Chinese to Russian to Yiddish to Swahili and back to English again — and still have it make sense.
The processing oomph, as well as the innovation, behind such an application is almost beyond imagining. And while hardware remains stalled on the grounds that the world's inventors have, for the time being, run out of gadgets to invent, consider this.
Back when the average computer hard drive was a couple of hundred megabytes, it was calculated that the number of distinct programmes that could be written to fit on such a drive (OK, not all at the same time) was 1 plus 2.7 billion zeros. These zeros would stretch 5,400 km if printed out in type this size. Given that laptop drives are now 100,000 times bigger and servers 100 million times bigger still, I think it's a given that there's still an awful lot of amazing software on its way.
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