The Focus Should Be on Mankind, Not Technology

Thank you to Jim Calloway at his Law Practice Tips Blog for reminding me that Time Magazine named YOU the person of the year. Time says that the year 2006 is about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. Check out the story here.

In the spirit of Web 2.0, I would also like to congratulate YOU. After nearly a decade where we all focused on technology and the Internet, we are finally coming full circle. Man is not here to serve technology. Technology is here to serve man. Technologist get so caught up in the latest and greatest hardware and software that they forget that mankind is both the object and driver for all innovation, including technological innovation. And I’m not talking about the people who create technology. I’m talking about the people for whom technology is created. I am talking about the end-user.

I worked for an Internet company in Boulder Colorado from 1994 to 1996. We built collaboration tools for hospital systems. Our technology was more sophisticated than most of what is on the market today, including Basecamphq. But, surprise, surprise, the end-user wasn’t near ready for such tools. In 1996, doctors and their staff were considered "hi-tech" if they were receiving email. By 1997, they were responding to email. By 1999, they were attaching documents to email.

The great revolution that people are now calling Web 2.0 is, as the Time Magazine "Man of the Year" article suggests, man. Despite our penchant for the status quo, the general population is now willing to consider changing their habits at work and at home. The revolution is not collaboration tools, it is the end-users willingness to use them.

The good news is that mankind is now willing to sit at their computer and interface with various software programs for hours on end, not the least of which are the web browser and email applications. The bad news is…well, that man still has to sit at their computer in order to drive these applications. For those of you who know me well, you know that I believe that mankind must find a way to separate himself from the computer, while preserving the ability to interface with it. The answer for now is found in personal assistance and portable dictation devices which allow us to instruct others how to interface with software programs such as basecamp. The real "ah-ha" moment here will be when mankind realizes that they can still derive the benefit of software and hardware without sitting in front of the screens themselves.