December 2010I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a generalterm for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things runningAndroid. The closest to a general term seems to be "mobile devices,"but that (a) applies to any mobile phone, and (b) doesn't reallycapture what's distinctive about the iPad.After a few seconds it struck me that what we'll end up callingthese things is tablets. The only reason we even consider callingthem "mobile devices" is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. If theiPad had come first, we wouldn't think of the iPhone as a phone;we'd think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.The iPhone isn't so much a phone as a replacement for a phone.That's an important distinction, because it's an early instance ofwhat will become a common pattern. Many if not most of thespecial-purpose objects around us are going to be replaced by appsrunning on tablets.This is already clear in cases like GPSes, music players, andcameras. But I think it will surprise people how many things aregoing to get replaced. We funded one startup that's replacing keys.The fact that you can change font sizes easily means the iPadeffectively replaces reading glasses. I wouldn't be surprised ifby playing some clever tricks with the accelerometer you could evenreplace the bathroom scale.The advantages of doing things in software on a single device areso great that everything that can get turned into software will.So for the next couple years, a good recipe for startupswill be to look around you for things that people haven't realizedyet can be made unnecessary by a tablet app.In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization todescribe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replacedby what we would now call software. The reason tablets are goingto take over the world is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co areindustrial design wizards, but because they have this force behindthem. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole thatwill allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. No onewho has studied the history of technology would want to underestimatethe power of that force.I worry about the power Apple could have with this force behindthem. I don't want to see another era of client monoculture likethe Microsoft one in the 80s and 90s. But if ephemeralization isone of the main forces driving the spread of tablets, that suggestsa way to compete with Apple: be a better platform for it.It has turned out to be a great thing that Apple tablets haveaccelerometers in them. Developers have used the accelerometer inways Apple could never have imagined. That's the nature of platforms.The more versatile the tool, the less you can predict how peoplewill use it. So tablet makers should be thinking: what else canwe put in there? Not merely hardware, but software too. What elsecan we give developers access to? Give hackers an inch and they'lltake you a mile.Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, andRobert Morris for reading drafts of this.
