The year 2007 was kicked off by Steve Jobs at the Moscone Center in San Francisco when he unveiled the first iPhone, the 2G phone, beginning a process by which we are now putting into the hands of everyone on the planet a handheld computer connected to the Internet
. | 2007,
a company called Google launched an open source operating system called Android. In 2007, this same
company called Google bought an obscure TV company called YouTube. In 2007, Jeff Bezos over at
Amazon.com gave us the world’s first e-book reader, the Kindle. In 2007, IBM launched the
world’s first cognitive computer called Watson. In 2007, three design students in San Francisco
who were attending the World Design Conference that year decided to rent out their three spare air mattressesto people
who couldn’t get a hotel room. And it worked out so well for them in 2007 they started Airbnb
| what else started in 2007? This is a graph of Cloud computing. Let’s
see, the first year it shows up is 2008. That means it started in 2007. And in 2007, of course, Intel for the
first time went off silicon to extend the exponential of Moore’s Law. It introduced non-silicon materials into its transistors,
which turned out to be a huge, huge accelerator. It turns out 2007 may in time be understood as the single greatest
technological inflection point since Guttenberg invented the printing press. And we completely missed it because of
2008. So right when our physical technologies suddenly just leapt ahead, like we were on a moving sidewalk
at an airport that went from 5 miles an hour to 35 miles an hour, like overnight, and we all felt the ground moving beneath
our feet, right when that happened, all our what Eric Beinhocker calls our social technologies - the regulating,
deregulating, the political reform, the economic reform, the management, the learning you needed to get the most out of this
acceleration and cushion the worst --a lot of that just froze. And we’re living in that dislocation right now How
did all this happen? Basically what produced 2007 is the fact that your computer has essentially five parts. It has the CPU,
the processor, the Moore’s Law microchip, but it also has a storage chip. It has networking, it has software,
and it has a sensor. Just as a camera, but sensors are going everywhere now. The fact is all five have been under Moore’s
Law and accelerating. And in 2007, they all melded into this thing we call “the Cloud.” The
Cloud.....The power of machines has exploded. Machines now have all five senses. They can now think. I spoke at IBM’s
Watson Developer Conference last month. And the day before I got there, they told me that Watson had just co-written
with Alex da Kid a song that in 48 hours went to number 4 on iTunes. | |