The New Suprises Only Those Who Lack Imagination

Sometimes, you can see how technology goes beyond your imagination and feels magic. OK, you guessed right where this is going, but let me take you to my memory lane first.

When I was 11 years old, Finland celebrated its 50th year of independence, having previously been under the rule of Russia and, before that, Sweden. The Ministry of Education organised a drawing contest for children to imagine the world in 50 years in 2017.

I took the challenge. In my mind, everything was based on computers, cars flying around, and electricity. Don't ask where I got those ideas.

However, fast forward to 1987. It was Christmas time, and I had recently purchased my first Mac. It was a Macintosh SE with a massive internal hard drive (can you imagine 20MB!) and two 3.5" disks. It was a dream come true.

I put it carefully on the desk in my room at my parent's house when I arrived to spend Christmas with them. I was proud to show it to my parents. After all, they had never seen a computer before.

When my mother came to the room, she looked less surprised than I expected. When I asked if she had seen a Mac before, she just said, "It seems like the one you drew for that school's drawing competition". And she went to find the drawing from the cupboard where she kept all my old school stuff. And voila, on that ten-year-old drawing was this machine with a screen looking precisely like the Mac in front of us.

It appears that the ideas of my 11-year-old have influenced the Mac team led by Steve Jobs in their vision for the future.

But that’s beside the point.

The real thing is that when I got my first Mac, I had the overwhelming feeling of magic and the future flowing from that machine. You don't get those Eurekas often. I knew that everything was bound to change in the way millions of others and I would create content and use it.

And it did. On the 24th of January 2024, Macintosh celebrated its 40th anniversary. And these days we all use computers with Graphic UI, mice and all. Apple started this revolution.

See the classic Super Bowl ad:

Then came the two decades of boredom when the Graphic UI became the mainstream and Apple almost lost its mojo. Until the iPod and 1000 songs in your pocket revolutionised the music industry. Fast forward to 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone. It, again, was a revolutionary product.

A few years earlier, in the late 90s, I had a chat with some of Nokia’s bright engineers and designers in Helsinki, and they very firmly told me that the touch-screen would never take off because of this and that and how it is technically impossible. The discussion was based on our company’s animated and very visionary UI concepts Nokia tasked us to do. One of them had a touch-screen and a map function that led the tow truck to the broken car in the middle of a desert. The engineers said it is cute but not possible. Well, I have always been afraid of people who know what is possible and what is not. The animated and cartoon-style concept is still vivid in my memory; Timo Ahde and Sampo Karjalainen were the teenage geniuses behind those animated stories for Nokia. They saw and showed the future, engineers didn’t.

And now comes my starting point for this newsletter.

Apple’s Vision Pro is here from the future of some school kid who imagined it decades ago.

It’s been interesting to read articles and watch commentaries about this new Spatial Computing platform. The scale is from absolute denial of its worth to a religious ecstasy. The truth is that both ends are wrong, and the middle parts are boringly missing the point on that scale. This is not a Bell Curve thing to plot known on the curved line but a new paradigm.

Apple stubbornly calls this Spatial Computing. Not VR/AR because it is more than those half-baked terms. I have not yet been able to use Vision Pro, but I can imagine (and my imagination has usually been more accurate than technical specs). For the first time, technology has been squeezed into a small form factor that allows us to interact with digital assets in the real experience context without compromising the user experience. For the first time, there are no compromises in the main technical implementation: the screens, cameras, and the way to communicate with the Spatial Computer.

This will change how we interact with information and each other and create and dream about new things. It might not be a mainstream product, but it will take the mainstream to new heights for sure because it has shown (like Mac, iPod and iPhone earlier) that this ‘reality distortion field’ is true and possible to create. My mind goes way faster than Musk’s rockets to imagine all the new uses of this technology. The benefits it brings range from education to health care and from individual well-being to business concepts.

Nobody believed that the Graphic UI would become mainstream, that songs could be distributed directly to your ears without physical shops, or that your finger could be kept on the pulse of stock markets anywhere you happen to be with your iPhone.

It is not a question about belief, disbelief or scepticism. The new dawn never asks anybody to believe that the sun will rise. It just sends the first rays of hope, and even if it is often darkest just before dawn, somebody is imagining the rays of hope for the future. Because we are people, we can do it. It is not artificial but built in our genes – this relentless optimism that we can move the mountains.

It’s like Nelson Mandela said: It is impossible until it is done.

So, I cannot wait to get Vision Pro and start my exploration of Spatial Computing.

What about you? Are you in the camp of deniers, sceptics, or fanatics? Or do you ignore the whole thing like those who laughed at me in 1988 when I proudly placed my first Nokia mobile phone (the brick, as they called it) on the restaurant table, telling me, 'Nobody wants to keep the phone with them all the time'? So, who was the 'brick': my phone or them?

Ngā Mihi

Jussi

This week’s book is “How to Drive Your Competition Crazy”

It is appropriate to give you this book because Guy Kawasaki has seen it all and been part of it. So, enjoy his insights, wit and warm teasing when thinking about how you can do it, too.

How to Drive Your Competition Crazy: Creating Disruption for Fun and Profit" is a guide by Guy Kawasaki that delves into strategies for outsmarting your competition in innovative and often unconventional ways. The book is not just about achieving business success through sheer power or resources; it's about using creativity, disruption, and strategic thinking to create a competitive edge.

Kawasaki sprinkles the book with anecdotes and case studies from his experiences and others’, making the content both informative and entertaining. The underlying message is that by thinking differently and being willing to take calculated risks, businesses can not only survive but thrive, even in markets dominated by larger players.

The book is a call to action for businesses to innovate, disrupt, and, ultimately, drive their competition crazy in a fun and profitable way. It's a testament to the power of creativity, strategic thinking, and customer-focused tactics in the competitive business landscape.

Get it from Amazon or Apple BookShop.