I’ve not been not in the IT industry for very long – almost 10 years if I include university, around 7 if I only count professional work – but I have the impression that new things have a lower wow effect on me than before.
I believe I’m getting a bit older and sort of used to these kind of things. The same way something difficult doesn’t scare me as much as before, because I know I can handle it, groundbreaking innovation is not that impressive anymore, because I know what has come before and, perhaps, can imagine what will come after.
I remember writing my first program in QBASIC when I was 12. It was supposed to be a quiz game that asked you questions, and you had to answer in text form, perfectly matching its hardwired answers. Punctuation included (I already was a nitpicker). There was no Internet at the time, at least not for me, so the world was limited to what I had at my disposal: an oldish 486 DX2 with (I think) 8 MB of RAM and a phenomenal Turbo Mode button. Surprisingly, they taught us QBASIC at school and for me that was the beginning of something new. Sadly I don’t even remember the name of my programming teacher.
Lets say I became fully aware of what was happening in the world only a couple years later. I started using the web, although at the time I didn’t really understand it. Full awareness came only in the last years of high school and during university, when I could start exchanging views and opinions with course mates. There wasn’t much happening back then. Perhaps I was too busy studying (yeah right) but I don’t remember any important news from then. Except perhaps the launch of Windows XP, and perhaps of the early models of iPods.
In the past five years, however, I remember a lot of new products/services being launched, and several advancements in research. If you think about it, it’s mostly consumer products, but there’s still a very long trail. Just think about the iPod/iPhone/iPad, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Android, Amazon… it all really started only a few years ago. The amount of innovation that has happened in the past 7 years is astounding. Most of such innovation has happened because there’s an open platform that unifies everything and everyone: the Internet.
But I’m digressing. Going back to the original topic, perhaps the problem is that all low-hanging fruits, made available by the Internet, have been taken and eaten. I suspect that we’re not going to see much groundbreaking innovation in the next years, but instead steady progress of current technologies and concepts. There’s a lot of land still to cover, but it won’t feel as grand and sensational as it had in recent times.