Ubiquitous Computing for Business: Find New Markets, Create Better Businesses, and Reach Customers Around The World 24-7-365

4. Still Stupid after All These Years

For me context is the key—from that comes the understanding of everything.

—Kenneth Noland, American abstract painter¹

When I first heard the term personal computing in the 1980s, I thought, “Finally! I’ll have a device and software tuned to my personal needs and ways of getting things done.” And for a while, I believed it. The PC let me create small programs (batch files on DOS, scripts on UNIX) that customized and combined functionality in ways that I wanted them to work together on that individual machine. Of course, you had to be something of a programmer to make it happen, but that was pretty much true of all customers in the computer market at the time. Not too much later, though, the industry created ...