Twelve Tools That Will Soon Go the Way of Fax and CDs

Dave Pollard [Meeting of Minds, Caledon, Ontario, Canada] wrote about this on his blog, How to Save the World. Here are snippets.

1. Hard Drives:
The price of bandwidth, and the price of storage space in cyberspace, have both dropped precipitously. Expect them to drop further. At the same time, Homeland Security is going to be scanning our laptops every time we cross borders, and delaying or charging us if they deem the content to be uh... unpatriotic. So why keep anything on a hard drive anymore? Let the storage and processing all be done in cyberplaces with lots of space and processing power and just stream the results to us, so our machines can be light, pocket-sized, always-connected, pure communication devices.
2. “Wall of Text” Reports & Documents:
Generation Millennium is returning to an oral or visual real-time culture, where blocks of text are used only when visualizations don’t convey what’s happening better….
3. “Best Practices”:
…the sad truth is that most “best practices” are so devoid of context, of the knowledge and history that explains why they are so effective, that they essentially become unactionable. Show, don’t tell, and discuss, don’t proclaim…
4. Email and Groupware:
…replaced by simple real-time face-to-face, voice-to-voice and IM technologies.
5. Corporate Websites:
You just can’t put a filing cabinet up online and expect people to wade through it. Next-gen blogs by individual employees—personal, casual, chatty, accessible, hosted but uncensored by the employer—will soon blow even the best corporate websites out of the water.
6. Corporate Intranets:
Same rationale as #5.
7. Corporate Libraries and Purchased Content:
With luck, [librarians will] learn the employer’s business and morph into subject matter specialists, producing real research and analysis and adding meaning and value to information. But they won’t need a proprietary library for that. Nor will they have to pay for the content they add value to much longer.
8. Cell Phones:
On my increasingly-compact, full-screen, full-keyboard laptop I can get wireless anywhere for a small flat monthly rate, and then make unlimited phone calls, download files and communicate in a dozen different ways for free. But now on this tiny awkward cell phone, you’re going to charge me for every message, and severely restrict what I can send and receive. And I’m going to put up with this why?
9. Classrooms:
There is really nothing that can be done in a classroom that can’t be done using desktop videoconferencing with screensharing, for free.
10. Meetings:
Same rationale as #9.
11. Job Titles:
[replaced by] cross-disciplinary teams.
12. Offices:
People would rather have the money than the real estate…. The next generation works anywhere, anytime, anyway—home, car, coffee shop, and there is “virtually” no reason to go into an office to talk on the phone and work on the

URL: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2008/08/05.html#a2212