The Cloud Will Be Disrupted.

The cloud is where it's all at.. A centralised, managed, virtual place, where all the data and logic go. It's comfortable. It's better than in house IT. It's safer than keeping your docs on your PC.

For my 100th blog post, I would like to make a careful prediction about the future of applications.

Like traditional IT before, the cloud also has its drawbacks. The biggest one: It's not really free, and it's not really yours.

The docs you put on Google, mails you send via your free provider, images you post on Facebook, files you put on dropbox - Unless you start paying a monthly tax for these conglomerates, is theirs to use, and sometimes delete.
Some of the big companies built an eco system (Google, Facebook, but also airBNB, Uber and a lot of the shared economy companies), which gets a lot of the population to be dependent on them for their monthly pay check.
Some of these companies have enough cash and political power to bend governments.

The shared economy is best for the customer, however it puts a lot of power in the hands of too few companies. Imagine that all taxi drivers at the states belong to Uber.

Part of the fear of societies and companies from bitcoin is not the currency itself, but the democratic, P2P model of its application - A distributed application, in which logic, as well as data, could be shared by every user, not just by the service provider - Because every user is, essentially, a service provider.

Imagine an airBNB service hosted by every airBNB user, containing all the users in his country - Without the need to pay commission to the airBNB. Or a 'floating' Uber like service, where drivers and customers connect and bid directly.

This will get the prices even lower, and give more to the specific service provider, rather than cut a fat commission to an already fat company.

The infrastructure is already there - In my opinion, we will start see those applications during the coming years. Like P2P shook the media world, decentralised applications will shake and disrupt the cloud.

Behold, the future!

This week, I've spent two days at the Google TLV Campus, participating in an amazing workshop given by Prime design studio.
Though I'll probably cover the workshop in another post (Waiting for 'official' photos), I would like to share one significant insight I've got:

During brainstorming for our workshop project's specs and features, Omri (Prime's CEO) sat with us, and while we were looking at a certain concept, asked us to look forward to the future of that product. What would such a product do 10 years from now? 20 years?

So we sat down, throwing down sci-fi inspired ideas ranging from laser grids and quad-copters to terra forming robots (Yes, it was THAT crazy).

[Side note] The two basic rules of brainstorming are: Write down everything, and never argue. Anything is possible during brainstorm, even the most ridiculous ideas.

After that, we looked at the result, and understood what we'll be working on. And though it was different from the original project and looked a bit like a moon shot, it started to seem possible, and the end result (And presentation) was awesome.

After contemplating on the whole process, I've come to realise that we almost never look at our product 10 years from now.

And we should, because a lot of those features could be implemented today. 

Successful companies are great at this, because they create the future of products now. The best example is Apple, but in a smaller scale, Waze, Nest and 23andMe are great examples as well.

Show your customers the future they want, and you will own it.

The future, according to us. Visioned product is top left.

Moonshooting.

Well, looks like there's a new buzzword in town: The moonshot.

The basic term means that instead of thinking how to solve a problem incrementally (Improve by 10%), you try to think how to solve it 'exponentially' (Improve 10 times instead).

Though there are already 'exponential thinking' courses taken at universities, Wired had a special issue about 'thinking big', and a nice website with all sorts of neat videos from top scientists and CEOs about how the world's problems are going to be solved in the coming years.

The way I see it, in today's world, this type of thinking is essential in today's scale factors. If you work in the b2c business, and solve a problem with data, you already need to think by millions and millions of transactions - That's exactly the 'big data' thinking.

So the next time you think about a redesigning your system for performance, try to think how it would handle 10 times more users. or 1000. or 1000000. The world has gotten big, it's time to scale our thinking as well :)