Another technology that perplexes me, one that I thought was on its way out a decade ago, is Cold Fusion. New coding standards, richer XHTML capabilities, and new languages would surely make this closed system obsolete, right? Wrong. A decade after thinking its days were limited (I had no timeframe in mind, I just saw the writing on the wall. Well, at least I THOUGHT I did…) I still see .cfm on many pages that I hit as I’m surfing around.

It’s tough to predict the future when it comes to the Internet and other computer-related technologies. Things that seem like a sure hit can fail for a variety of reasons (marketing, bad implementation, politics, etc) while other technologies that seem as if they are becoming obsolete continue to exist, and sometimes thrive. For now I guess the safe bet would be to use the technologies that have the most compatibility and sadly, the most backing. I say sadly because backing can come from deep wallets wanting to push a particular standard for reasons of profit rather than promoting the most useful and promising technology. Goodbye Betamax, sorry Minidisk, you had a chance Ogg Vorbis but not good enough, you were fun while you lasted HD-DVD. There goes that semester of programming I took in Pascal…

The discouraging thing is that in this day and time, business and technology moves along at a MUCH faster pace than it did even just a couple decades ago. Our product could be obsolete by the time this patent gets granted. Every month that goes by is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of missed revenue.

We’ve heard of the USPTO reforms that are supposed to be taking place. When will we actually see these changes? How many millions of dollars must be lost before the USPTO becomes an efficient machine? The economy of the U.S. would benefit from these changes and the U.S. would also become competitive in the international marketplace. Until these changes take place, thousands of good ideas will fail to make it to market at a relevant time, businesses will fail to have a chance to succeed, and our competitive advantage will continue to deteriorate. 

Here’s what I’m really seeing out of this however. Apple releases a wildly popular product with consumers. We’ve come to expect that from Apple. And of course being in the limelight, there are many critical eyes on what Apple releases. “No SDK!” and “No exchange support!” were two biggies that were most often talked about. “The iPhone has no chance going against the BlackBerry without Exchange support.”

What Apple did was genius. They create a simple to use smartphone (with elegant design of course). I don’t even think Apple intended for this to be a BlackBerry competitor. However, they release what they want to release yet leave it flexible enough to add what needs to be added when they hear back from the masses. The masses wanted Exchange support and now each new iPhone will come with it built in. They let the general population do the test marketing and dictate what would be featured in a great product. The first iPhone was no failure by any means, yet after releasing what they wanted for the consumers and then listening to the enterprise wish list, they now have a product for both consumers and business. Genius I say.