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Objects will Become "Webjects"
I coined this term recently, which is "webjects", which was essentially web plus objects. And the Internet of things is one way that occurs, where you have, you know, a physical object that's traditionally quite dumb and isolated, and you put a sensor or some other sort of smart thing into it that allows it to gather data around it, so like even dumb objects kind of carry a backpack of data around about them. But the object itself doesn't really change that much. So that's one sort of webject.
The other kind of webject is where the Internet comes into the object and we're seeing this more and more where web content is presented in a way that is essentially invisible as it being web content, and the user just interacts with it as though it was any other kind of application on the device, and this is applying to smart phones but we're seeing it in retail, in healthcare, you know, any number of different areas that you can imagine; this change is now coming in.
And it essentially means that the web is getting embedded into pretty much everything around us, and at the same time every object around us is getting smarter about, you know, who's using it, what environment it's in, and all the other objects that are around it.
Enhancing the Innate Value of Things
From a product design standpoint it raises a lot of interesting questions because on the one hand you've got things like the iPhone and all the other phones that look like it, and the iPad, where essentially the object just becomes a blank slate; the object itself isn't necessarily that interesting. It's all about that content. And so that's one approach.
I think the other approach, which is more interesting in the long run is that the objects retain their traditional form, materials, sort of interest as being objects, but at the same time we try and bring all the smarts of the web into it. And I think right now it's pretty much -- with these sort of slates, it's pretty much just "okay, we're just going to take this flat object and stick the web onto it." And that's fine as a first step but I think we're going to see much more sophisticated combinations of those two, over the next few years.
Products will be Sold More as Ecosystems
In just about every mature industry there's just too much competition. And so there's always commoditization; companies are trying to figure out, you know, how do we branch out into new areas, how do we keep an advantage over our competitors, be able to command a margin differential and so on. And so ecosystems allow that to happen because they allow you to get out of the sort of the race to the bottom in terms of selling an individual product, and you're selling much more of a holistic solution.
The challenge with ecosystems is they're -- you're crossing such diverse domains; there's physical products and there's software and services. And those are all things that are not used to talking to one another. So I think that's going to be a challenge. But there's very much the incentive there to make that happen, and so I think that will be one of the big enablers that will really make this take off in the next few years.
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Design Thinking at IDEOby StanfordUniversity14,654 views
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