The next big thing will start out looking like a toy

One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten years ago. It wasn’t as if those former top companies were complacent – most of them acquired and built products like crazy to avoid being displaced.

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve (technology adoption is usually non-linear due to so-called complementary network effects). The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC (microcomputer), and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype. (Christensen has many more examples in his books).

This does not mean every product that looks like a toy will turn out to be the next big thing. To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes. Obviously, products get better inasmuch as the designer adds features, but this is a relatively weak force. Much more powerful are external forces: microchips getting cheaper, bandwidth becoming ubiquitous, mobile devices getting smarter, etc. For a product to be disruptive it needs to be designed to ride these changes up the utility curve.

Social software is an interesting special case where the strongest forces of improvement are users’ actions. As Clay Shirky explains in his latest book, Wikipedia is literally a process – every day it is edited by spammers, vandals, wackos etc., yet every day the good guys make it better at a faster rate. If you had gone back to 2001 and analyzed Wikipedia as a static product it would have looked very much like a toy. The reason Wikipedia works so brilliantly are subtle design features that sculpt the torrent of user edits such that they yield a net improvement over time. Since users’ needs for encyclopedic information remains relatively steady, as long as Wikipedia got steadily better, it would eventually meet and surpass user needs.

A product doesn’t have to be disruptive to be valuable. There are plenty of products that are useful from day one and continue being useful long term. These are what Christensen calls sustaining technologies. When startups build useful sustaining technologies, they are often quickly acquired or copied by incumbents. If your timing and execution is right, you can create a very successful business on the back of a sustaining technology.

But startups with sustaining technologies are very unlikely to be the new ones we see on top lists in 2020. Those will be disruptive technologies – the ones that sneak by because people dismiss them as toys.

jryu

My favorite current examples of “toys” are Flip cams and netbooks. Both were considered toys by incumbents when they first hit the scene. I'm a student of experience/learning curve effects so this topic really fascinates me.
http://twitter.com/howardlindzon howardlindzon

because I think exits at the big side remain slow for web companies, it will be hard for start-up people with sustaining technologies to stay patient and not sell quickly.

interesting times for entrepreneurs.

http://fitnr.com Louis Marascio

Good point Howard. What about Mint. Do you think they chose to go early to Intuit partly because they felt they were in the sustaining camp and didn't have a large enough trend to ride to become the next great web company? Interested in yours and Chris' thoughts here.

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

Mint's an intriguing case. Everyone says it was disruptive but I'm not sure. Just because you do something on the web that is similar to something done currently in a download doesn't by itself make it disruptive. Mint was pretty useful from day 1 as well and although I could see it getting better its hard to seeing it ride a trend to get 10x-100x better.

http://pegobry.tumblr.com/ Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

I think the Mint exit was the founder facing a big pile of cash PLUS a great career move — unlike most exits he won't be buried but will actually lead Intuit's consumer moves from now on afaik.

As far as whether Mint was disruptive, as such the product probably wasn't, but I think it definitely had the potential to be. Personal finance/banking is begging to be disrupted.

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

yes, if you are sustaining and you get a decent offer you probably want to sell. if you are disruptive you should raise enough cash and keep the burn low for the long haul.
http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

Certainly for first time founders, a big enough offer will generally cause them to make the deal. So you need to have a founder/team that has been through a life changing deal once, or that values the long term disruption/sustained growth even more than the guaranteed life change.

Great point Howard.

side note: Me and the tech meistro Tyler are tightening up some loose pieces of the ad widget now, should have it in great shape for a blog as active as your own shortly. PS, no matter what we do to prep there's a good chance high user interaction could snap it.

http://fitnr.com Louis Marascio

Good points Chris, couldn't agree more: some contemporary examples: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare/Gowalla (potentially). What else?

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

tough question. these are just off the cuff, gut reactions – and I'll leave out any FounderCollective investments where I'm clearly biased: kickstarter, blippy, etsy, zopa/prosper, huffingtonpost, businessinsider, stocktwits…?

jacopogio

I don't know why, but could it be that you think that http://hunch.com/ could be one of these “winning toys” ?

Would be interesting to have a “interactive forum of suggestions to speed-up the relevance of Hunch”.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

no comment

theflyingchange

What's the funding completion ratio on kickstarter? My sense is that their Suggested User List-parallel (i.e. their front page) gets 80% of all the donations and most projects aren't completed. Great post, Chris. Stocktwits is a great example. HuffPo was launched with so much dough it probably doesn't qualify.

@JoeTierney

Excellent read, thank you! Google Apps comes to mind immediately. The video chat functionality is currently great to speak with a loved one anywhere in the world – functionality far beyond that leveraged by most businesses. Integrate Google Voice with Apps and you have one of the world's best unified communications solutions at a tiny fraction of the price of today's options. These 'toys' require no capital investment so for the first time in history businesses of all sizes, from the enterprise to the sole practitioner, have access to the same great tools.

What would be the impact on the US economy if SMB's were 5% more productive? They have more toys now than ever and younger workers much more willing to push their limits.

@JoeTierney

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

Google apps is for sure disruptive. I'm sure the MS Office guys chuckle at how dinky it is, but every day it gets better and my spreadsheet/wordprocessing needs stay flat.

http://www.aseidman.com/ ariel

Anecdotal experience on Google Apps vs. MS Office:
I tried Google Docs and Spreadsheets for much of '09 and I found myself back with Excel and Word towards the end of the year. Prior to Google acquiring Writely there was plenty of innovation happening and it seems to have slowed significantly. While Microsoft still fails miserably when it comes to sharing/collaboration they remain far superior when it comes to content generation and manipulation. Things that either took much too long or were not possible in Google Docs/Spreadsheet I can do in Word/Excel incredibly quickly.
On the innovation side lets give credit where credit is due they nailed the Office ribbon design.

antrod

I dont know that I agree with the toy argument. Google is perhaps the greatest example of a technology that was certainly not a “toy” in the “undershooting users' needs” to start out with. They creamed the incumbents because the incumbents had grown complacent and declared search a commodity.

Ditto for the MP3 market and Apple, the smartphone market and Apple, or even as Howard says in the comments, netbooks. Having just worked for the biggest PC manufacturer out there, I can assure you, noone there ever saw them as a “toy.” Rather, people just hoped that their incumbent power as the market leader could help them treat the segment as commodity and therefore not critical.

The toy argument works well in a few cases, the primary one being the PC. But frankly, I'd be surprised if anyone who is in a pole position these days gets caught by this. Look at Microsoft and Linux, or even the web browser. Both have been “toy” alternative to the desktop for a long time, and despite the fact that an amalgam of the two may end up killing Windows on the desktop, it won't be because Redmond didn't take them seriously.

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

Google: it depends on what the user's needs are seen to be. At the time, everyone thought the user needed a big integrated content portal stock quotes, email etc. Everyone in tech knew google was a better search engine, they just thought search by itself didn't matter.

Netbooks: Personally I don't think the netbooks are very interesting or disruptive. The big PC guys will focus on that while something else sneaks up from behind.

I agree that as Christensen's ideas have gained currency the big guys are more attuned to this kind of thing.

Harshad

So, you think netbooks are “toys”?

http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

I'm pretty sure we don't know what's going to kill Google, or Microsoft yet. It's the startups that are building something we aren't aware of that so effective at disruption. They're rapidly gaining strength/effectiveness while current tech markets progress along known paths.

It's not BigCos' fault, they're big, and have huge hungry investor mouths to feed. They are lead by massive committees. How can they possibly disrupt their own markets (and potentially shrink them)?

My “far out” guess, self disrupting businesses will probably be the mainstay in just 20 years. Businesses have to be willing to undergo large overhauls to remain flexible/dynamic.

davidlocke

Right, go out and sell a client and build a market, rather than jumping to the pragmatists too early and then blaming BigCo. If you are having problems getting BigCos to bite, you skipped the infrastructure for the emerging market, an infrastructure that must be in place before BigCo will buy.

And, no BigCo won't buy toys, or pre-inflection S-curve technologies.

Christensen talks more about the overserved, than Moore's early markets. Christensen's overserved are in the late markets. Disruptions are early market, and usually carrier, rather than carried components of the product.

http://cromotion.net BerislavLopac

Actually, when Google started it was most certainly been viewed as a toy, or at least nothing serious. Two *students*, making *another* search engine, offering nothing *but a text field* and a *colorful* logo? In the immortal words of Bessemer's David Cowan: “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vgondi/about Vishi Gondi

My list of disruptive technologies for the next decade:
Google Voice in Apps for your domain will change how sales calls to an SMB work.

Flash player with hardware HD video decoding will change how video is watched at home and on the go.

Crowd Sourcing and a structured version of Mechanical Turk will see a lot of work.

Oh and Hunch

Feel free to list your fav ones.
http://twitter.com/communicating Chris

Hi Chris,

Generally I agree (9 times out of 10) with your startup thoughts, especially given you and members of your super team (like ex-vancouverite Catrina) have done it before (and I've just been building for past 8 years) but I have a couple of quibbles on this post (but not necessarily “disagreement”).

Flickr is a perfect example of your thesis so I see where the germ of this idea may have come from but I think you're missing that most toy startups remain toys. While startups who strive for non-toys (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc) tend to be the real big winners.

I also think (bring on the hate mail) that this type of thinking, also espoused by YCombinator is hamstringing many startups.

So what do I think will be big in the next 10 years? Startups focusing on non-toy solutions for Big Data, Intelligence & Goverment, Publishing and New Device Optimized User Interfaces.

Cheers,

Christopher

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

When I say “toy” I don't mean it has to be a little idea or unimportant. Wikipedia, Skype and the PC all started off as “toys” to the incumbents and I think we'd all agree they are quite serious tools right now.

http://twitter.com/communicating Chris

I misunderstood and stand corrected.

You are saying that incumbents and possibly the public viewed as actually disruptive services/products as “toys”. This I very much agree with (and have experienced both sides first hand).

Cheers,

Christopher

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http://twitter.com/L1AD LIAD

“Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs.”

they may undershoot mass market and “power-user” needs but theoretically hit low-market/new-market needs perfectly by a combination of simplicity, convenience or reduced price etc

if they undershot everyone's needs they would suffer an instant death as there would be no market for them whatsoever.

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

yes, you are right. i wrote that sloppily. I think they way Christensen usually phrases it they undershoot the more demanding users needs and target the low end of the market.

http://portal.eqentia.com William Mougayar

Great post, and your 2 bolded themes hit the nail on the head.
Big Co's are also the ones to quickly diss early versions of Internet-based or consumer oriented apps, but these end-up creeping up on them by users who want them. E.g. Google Alerts, salesforce.com. Even the BlackBerry had a toyish appeal when it first started when it used to be jokingly called Crackberry.
The consumerizing of technologies is giving a big headache to enterprise CIO's. Now, users can grab even more Internet, SaaS or mobile apps and challenge the old “enterprise app” paradigm.
Do you see “consumer” apps initially disguised as “toys” also creeping-up on enterprise apps and enterprise users?

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

I really don't know the enterprise world that well, but maybe things like Yammer are examples of consumer type products creeping into the enterprise?

http://portal.eqentia.com William Mougayar

Yes, and beyond that. I think a flurry of SaaS-based apps are disrupting the previous “enterprise app” paradigm.

http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

This is probably the best post I've seen of yours Chris. 11/10.

Here's why I loved it:
It breaks down the essence of what founders need to understand as they move forward. They're product/service is going to be a joke at first, otherwise they'd get copied/gobbled up. Reality check to us makers, if BigCo A new how awesome your idea was (and how ready the market was) they'd have done it on their own.

You point out the power of network effects on a startup (I'm a big fan of Kevin Kellys). It's not just the features (linear growth) but the external forces (hardware, tech, external web services improving, of which network effects can be dominant). Startups that leverage other startups or service types can grow much better incredibly fast if they pick the right APIs/platforms.

Thanks for putting this one out there.

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

Hey mark – thanks! glad you liked it. I have almost never seen a correlation between what BigCo people think of startups and how the startup actually performs. I am not saying that all startups are good ideas, but people saying it is a toy in and of itself shouldn't discourage you.

http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

I suppose the folks in BigCo that might love the idea you're startup is working on
1) may not have the authority and resources
2) or be willing to risk their reputation

To build a competing or better version.

http://twitter.com/joshreznick Josh Reznick

I agree 100% – Even the application stack used to power the majority of new prominent web-based businesses (Linux, MySQL, PHP etc) were all previously regarded by enterprise software companies as hobbyist toys..

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

Great examples…

http://venturehacks.com nivi

Remember when Eric Schmidt called Twitter a “poor man's email?” Innovators know that's a compliment.

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

*great* example Nivi.. thx

http://blog.rosania.org Paul Rosania

Great article. The current Augmented Reality “toys” out there (3GS apps, for example) have been tickling my right brain for this exact reason, thanks for putting it into words!
http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

Perhaps it's already happening? I'm sure you've heard of the toy that allows you to hover things using your mind?
davidkpark

I enjoyed the post immensely. Two quick comments:

(1) How you use and define the term “toy” seems…a little odd. You define toys as something that when it is first launched it “undershoots” users needs. I usually think of “toy” as a “thing to play with: something meant to be played with, especially by children” but I recognize that it also can be defined as “something unimportant: something of little value or importance,” which is how you're using the term. I think a more precise definition of “toy” would be helpful.

(2) I cannot see how you can falsify your claims, ie choose among the many “toys” that will become the dominant technology and/or product in 2020.

I tell my graduate students that one can do social science with both prospective and retrospective lens and using both lens can help illuminate the validity of one's theory. For example, retrospective starts at 2010 and picks the dominant products and traces their evolution. So we can see how these latent disruptive “toys” became dominant. Usually social scientists who only use this method, come up with a theory post hoc, and voila the theory fits the data. Lot of B-school profs do this with their case studies. Testing theories this way is limited because it “selects” on the dependent variable.

Prospective starts in 2000 and attempts to pick out the “toys” that became dominant in 2010 (limited by what we knew in 2000). This is much harder, because instead of selecting on the dependent variable, you now have a real distribution of toys and the theory needs to accurately predict what we see in 2010. I think this is where the “toy” theory shows it's limitation and why it may not be as helpful as a guide for entrepreneurs.

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

I am borrowing “toy” from Christensen – I think he definitely means it in the sense of “something unimportant: something of little value or importance”.

re how to “choose among the many “toys” that will become the dominant technology and/or product in 2020.”. I try to offer some guidelines grounded in theory, but don't claim to be able to make solid predictions. I think this theory like many entrepreneurial principles is indeed quite limited. Creating/predicting the future is very, very hard.
davidlocke

A toy is a critical element in your technical evangelism where you are trying to get technical enthusiasts to play with and recommend the toy to others in the the technical enthusiast layer of the market. Technical enthusiasts refer technology to B2B early adopters.

Toy might also describe the technology's S-curve below its inflection point.

If you want to find the toys, go out looking for the stuff being funded by early adopters. It will be out there in a niche, so nobody sees it until it explodes in the larger horizontal market.
http://shanacarp.com/essays ShanaC

You're a smart guy about predicting the future when it comes to the social sciences

http://kevrichard.com Kevin Richard

Wow this is really relevant to the conversation I was having just a few seconds ago. Right now Foursquare seems like a giant toy, right now it stands at a cross road will it gain more use and become a tool or will it be too obscure and eventually fall away? I think 2010 will be an important year for the firm.

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

I agree Foursquare is exciting and could be disruptive, but one thing I'd say is don't confuse “toy” as Christensen uses it in the somewhat derogatory sense as something “not that useful or unimportant” with the “game” sense of “toy” which also fits Foursquare.

http://danielmiessler.com/ Daniel Miessler

I think the confusion of the two types of “toy” is actually pertinent
to the conversation. You may think you're playing, but in fact be
getting (and/or giving) something valuable. The idea seems to be to
hide the useful portion of an activity within the fun part. Useful to
who–that's the question.

psalil

Great post. One of the important and tricky aspect of disruptive technologies is that they don't look very disruptive in themselves (in the beginning). Only after complementary network effect, or further user embellishments do we start realizing that this “new thing” could be disruptive. I wonder if any of the disruptive products were concluded as disruptive when they were introduced.
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traxor

Interesting post Chris .

I will say, however, that I think most people are much more open to new technologies now. I can't speak for any companies, but from what I've seen now-a-days, people seem to be giving things a chance.

It may just be companies panicking about potential threats and laughing at any possibly adversity rather than tackling it.
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http://twitter.com/Franko Francesco Giartosio

Brilliant post, thanks. So the conclusion is that my next startup should not only be conceived bearing in mind the technology trends; but also that if it's not really useful currently it's even better, so I have the time to grow it, right?

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

No, it should be useful to someone, but it can be the least demanding
users. Think about how early skype users were willing to tolerate
poor qos and the hassle of setting up skype to make free international
phone calls.

jacopogio

On the other hand, it looks also an “ex-post” way to see the past. It is just after the success of Skype that you could say that it was a “winning toy” because for a winning toy there must be thousands of “failing toys”
But for a “smart” VC, it is important not to focus “only” on winning start-ups that seem to have all right since the beginning but also on “possible winning toys”

http://blog.botfu.com Kevin Marshall

One other thing that *should* make this trend continue even more in the future is that thanks to open data sets, developer tools, and emerging standards across many sectors…it's easier than ever to quickly build 'toys'. This means you can do a lot more, fail faster, and only bother to iterate on the 'popular' ones that have a real chance at being disruptive…
http://www.wiseclerk.com/group-news/ Claus (P2P-Banking.com)

Chris,

from your personal perception: say that p2p lending fits into this category?

http://twitter.com/cdixon chris dixon

definitely

http://twitter.com/paulwsmart Paul

Interesting to note how many companies on the 1999 list were trying to beat AOL/Yahoo at their own game (i.e., portal that sucks you in and never lets you go). Interestingly, the winner — Google — ended up being a company who did exactly the opposite (get you in and out with the right answer as quickly as possible). Gotta admire the courage of “toy makers.” Great post, Chris.
http://g-a-i-a.org jazzmann91

Absolutely true. I played the next big toy years ago. The game was called Civilizations by Sid Meier. It encouraged my strategic mind. Now it's time to scale a similar yet different toy. Thanks for writing!

Scott Lewis
NouveauMasterToymaker
http://g-a-i-a.org
Peace
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twoElectric

This is a bit of a snarky article. It implies that because Wikipedia started out small, it was like a toy, further confirming that the next big thing will begin as a toy. SORRY!!! “A toy is an object used in play.” The only thing this article claims is that the next big thing will start small.

And SORRY AGAIN: http://web.archive.org/web/20010331173908/http:…

Wikipedia in March 2001 didn't look like a toy! It didn't look fun. It only had 3000 pages, but they did look organized and like a (small) encyclopedia.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

I am using “toy” to mean something dismissed by “serious” people at the time. The way Erich Schmidt dismissed Twitter as a “poor man's email.” Not necessarily something fun.

twoElectric

Good response. I suppose you mean: “The next big thing will start out looking like a trifle”. But I still think it's a bit snarky. I think 99% of big things, big things that were not once big, started small and scrawny, ala the Ugly Duckling.

However, Erich said Twitter was great and also his company paid an undisclosed sum of money to Twitter recently for real-time search of Twitter feeds. On the other hand, 140 characters or less is not actually something innovative, it's really just another social network, and it's only the 3rd most popular one. If someone else makes a different social network with a slightly different take on the messaging protocol, when can we say that it has become the next big thing!!! Experts agree that Twitter is not serious enough for businesses (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-334651.html), though smiley faces are kosher in some workplaces.

In my opinion it takes a bit more than lightheartedness to become the proverbial next big thing. Some companies tried to take SecondLife seriously, but it just isn't ready for prime time!

And my final remark for today is that robots are likely to become one of the next big things. Few people today have a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, and many types of robots can be found in toystores rather than in a hardware store or department store (toy section excluded). Therefore, I'd argue that quite literally one of the next big things today looks like a toy (outside Japan, where robots are already big and untoylike) will be personal robots in the home for cleaning, cooking, aged care, child care, entertainment, etc.

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choard

Great read Chris, and spot on! I remember when car phones were just 'toys for the rich', until the next generation of computer processors was fast enough to switch calls smoothly from one cell site to another with a minimum of call drops. Then cell phones disrupted the pay phone side, and now, the whole landline side.

IMHO, one of the next 'toys' could well be the next generation of Bluetooth, allowing a tighter integration of cell phone with automotive vehicle, passing those apps to the brains of the car. It will be interesting to see whether it comes from a new young upstart, Sirius/XM, or if the newly smaller Big Three are now rightsized enough to be innovative or are still too conservative to set up a skunk works of their own.
twoElectric

This is a bit of a snarky article. It implies that because Wikipedia started out small, it was like a toy, further confirming that the next big thing will begin as a toy. SORRY!!! “A toy is an object used in play.” The only thing this article claims is that the next big thing will start small.

And SORRY AGAIN: http://web.archive.org/web/20010331173908/http:…

Wikipedia in March 2001 didn't look like a toy! It didn't look fun. It only had 3000 pages, but they did look organized and like a (small) encyclopedia.
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http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

I am using “toy” to mean something dismissed by “serious” people at the time. The way Erich Schmidt dismissed Twitter as a “poor man's email.” Not necessarily something fun.
twoElectric

Good response. I suppose you mean: “The next big thing will start out looking like a trifle”. But I still think it's a bit snarky. I think 99% of big things, big things that were not once big, started small and scrawny, ala the Ugly Duckling.

However, Erich said Twitter was great and also his company paid an undisclosed sum of money to Twitter recently for real-time search of Twitter feeds. On the other hand, 140 characters or less is not actually something innovative, it's really just another social network, and it's only the 3rd most popular one. If someone else makes a different social network with a slightly different take on the messaging protocol, when can we say that it has become the next big thing!!! Experts agree that Twitter is not serious enough for businesses (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-334651.html), though smiley faces are kosher in some workplaces.

In my opinion it takes a bit more than lightheartedness to become the proverbial next big thing. Some companies tried to take SecondLife seriously, but it just isn't ready for prime time!

And my final remark for today is that robots are likely to become one of the next big things. Few people today have a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, and many types of robots can be found in toystores rather than in a hardware store or department store (toy section excluded). Therefore, I'd argue that quite literally one of the next big things today looks like a toy (outside Japan, where robots are already big and untoylike) will be personal robots in the home for cleaning, cooking, aged care, child care, entertainment, etc.
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choard

Great read Chris, and spot on! I remember when car phones were just 'toys for the rich', until the next generation of computer processors was fast enough to switch calls smoothly from one cell site to another with a minimum of call drops. Then cell phones disrupted the pay phone side, and now, the whole landline side.

IMHO, one of the next 'toys' could well be the next generation of Bluetooth, allowing a tighter integration of cell phone with automotive vehicle, passing those apps to the brains of the car. It will be interesting to see whether it comes from a new young upstart, Sirius/XM, or if the newly smaller Big Three are now rightsized enough to be innovative or are still too conservative to set up a skunk works of their own.
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taicrane

That's an interesting insight!!!
taicrane

That's an interesting insight.
http://shanacarp.com/essays ShanaC

You know, I don't own a Wacom Pad but I think a heavily interfaced and touch screen enabled Wacom like device would be a lot of fun. Especially if it had some sort of plasticly physical pushback no matter where you touched or wrote/drew on it, and was web enabled.

The reason we use mice is that the shoulder-wrist movements are the limiting factor of screen movements if you want an external device that can move on an xy coordinate system. A pencil/stylus is actually better because you can use your fingers too, but its much harder without the pushback of the material- and coloring is always a children's activity.
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Chris Dixon