So, my name is Charles Arthur I'm a technology journalist. I've been covering science, technology and, business for
something like 30 years. Most recently, I was technology editor at The Guardian; before that, I was technology editor at The Independent.
I was also for a period, Science and Technology editor. Before that, I was at New Scientist.
Before that, I was at a business magazine. Before that, I was at Computer Weekly. Tech science, and a little bit of health.
I mean ... The science thing crossed over into health when I did a lot about BSE and
Variant CJD which was an interesting time.
I think that we're in a period of what I call tech stasis, where we aren't seeing any great
changes in the technology environment around us.
If you think back to, say, 2007-2010, that sort of period,
there was enormous change going on in the world.
Apple introduced its iPhone, Google introduced Android,
Samsung and other big companies jumped onto the Android bandwagon.
Microsoft introduced Windows Phone to make up for Windows Mobile, which was falling behind then.
Blackberry was fighting to stay in existence, Palm was trying to come up with smart phones.
There was gigantic change happening. There were enormous sort of growth areas in all these spaces.
Now, speaking in 2018
We've got a point where Apple has 15% of the smartphone market and Android has 85% of it
And there's no sign of that changing except by one or two percentage points either way for the foreseeable [future].
We know where it is. We know what's happening.
Moore's Law, the dictum that processor power would increase by a factor of two every 18 months, has effectively stopped
Because they can't make processors any smaller.
So they add more cores, but as you have more cause you don't actually get that sort of increase in power.
So Moore's law has stopped. There's no more fighting in the smartphone space.
When you think what's the most dramatic new technology you've seen,
it's stuff like smart speakers where, you know, it sits in your kitchen and you set a timer for it,
or you ask it to play a piece of music, or you ask it a silly question or something. And that's about it.
You could do the same with your phone, as well, and there's no sort of big changes.
And the thing I think that certainly gets journalists' interests
but I think also gets people more generally interested is when there's big flux, when there's a lot of change happening.
And I'm just not seeing that at the moment and it's a bit hard to say. Why not?
I think it's partly because smartphones do so much that they've really captured
our ability to do so many things in this little black screen.
That means that you don't need anything else in your life. I mean Google tried with Google glass
Arguably it was too early, but also arguably they just didn't do enough.
You'd need glasses that would do everything.
Magic Leap has got a billion dollars in funding and they've come up with augmented reality glasses,
but people have tried them and they don't seem that impressed by them. Microsoft is trying the same with HoloLens
I've tried HoloLens and it's not going to take the world over.
Virtual reality doesn't seem to be going anywhere--that as a market is, you know, if anything shrinking.
So the question is: when's the next big change going to come? Where is it going to come from?
Some people might say blockchain, but I think not really. I think that that's just too energy-intensive, too full of scams,
There's just not enough happening there. It's got to be in second order effects.
So, rather as Uber was an application which was built on top of the smartphone,
I think the next things that are going to change how we think of technology have to be things that are built on
top of the existing platforms, but
For the moment, for the next few years, I think we're gonna have to just get used to what we have.
And it's... I don't know. It just feels like stasis. It's the longest period I can remember when very little changed.
At some point a piano was a new technology, right, and nowadays a piano is a piano, right?
Do you think the same's going to happen with mobiles, or tablets,
are they just gonna be a thing: you don't need to replace it, just does what it does? Do you think...?
I think that's already the case.
I mean, people [who] have a PC, a desktop PC, a laptop, now hang on to that for years.
Mine is 6 years old and I still don't see any need to change it.
People were hanging onto tablets for longer and longer so that market, you know, really flattened out.
With smartphones, people are just not as eager as they were to grab the the latest and greatest and that's affected Samsung
And that's affected Samsung, to some extent it's affecting Apple.
So yeah, I think people just get satisfied with what they have and then they're looking for something new but
Rather as for the desktop, you could tell that the desktop was over when people stopped developing apps for it
You know, it stopped being for the desktop first and that happened in 2010.
That was when the last big apps that happened first on the desktop happened.
And that was Dropbox and Spotify. They both happened in 2010. And the next big apps after that was Instagram.
That was only on the mobile phone. It was years before you could get anything to do with Instagram on the desktop.
And then after that you have things like WhatsApp and so on, and it all moved to mobile.
But now there's no other platform. Mobile is where everything happens
And I don't know. It just feels like we're...
We're having to sort of live with it, but it's almost as if this
The mine is sort of worked out. That there's nothing new. It's always very dangerous obviously to say that, to say
'Oh, well, that's all, it's all been invented.' I think there was something back in 1996 or something
that said, 'Well, that's it. You know, that's it for the world.
We've invented everything.' But, I just feel that with everything in the stasis that it is,
that It's very difficult for something to break through dramatically, for a small company to come up with something here and the way that Google did
back in 1996 when they were brand new and they were able to
overturn the whole search engine world.
One doesn't get the feeling that there's the same weakness there, because the big companies are so big.
You know, the Apples and the Googles and the Microsofts of this world, and the Facebooks and the Twitters and the [inaudible],
I think they're all so big that if a small company starts to come up,
then they can swap what they're doing and they can get ahead of them
And I should caveat this by saying I'm going I'm going to be talking in general terms
each operating system with us: Windows, Linux, Mac OS,
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