Eventually, everything becomes a commodity

Google and Amazon are slowly killing the gadget as we know it
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Which is one of the reasons technology pricing continues to rapidly decline.

More below the fold.

The Cloud will change our world in ways we can't imagine. I remember the first time I saw the Apple iPhone. I realized that the Japanese had gone down a much more gadget much less software road, and Apple had taken a completely different path. It seems that pretty soon the value in the device will be in battery life, screen quality/resolution, and the camera. 

I also remember when I first say these Corning Glass vids:

The first Corning vid was brilliant. It turned many of the smart things today into much lower cost dumb things which relied on the smart phone for "intelligence." This seems incredibly perceptive at the time, and it expanded the "computer" to any surface made of glass. Once I bought Alexa, I realized the cloud would likely even make most of the smart phone a commodity. 

"The Chromecast and the Echo are relatively cheap gadgets — because all the important, useful stuff about them lives in the cloud, they're optimized to be small, efficient, and unobtrusive."

The voice interface on the Echo is powerful. After rewatching the first Day of Glass, I realized how much the actors have to manually operate controls. After a year with Alexa, I do not think this will be the future. The voice interface is much more natural, although a manual interface will likely still be needed, seldom used, but needed. For the same reason that your television likely has a hidden manual control somewhere on the body. 

It has been only 9 years since the release of the first iPhone, and 5 since the release of the first Corning Day of Glass vid, since then the Cloud has become something to reckon with, and seems likely to change how we interface with our computers and tech devices. Ultimately, the article gets much right, it seems that devices are likely to become commodities which act as a switch turning on other dumb devices, and a link between these devices and the cloud where the actual computing will take place. This means all of our devices will be able to be much cheaper. It will also require greater cell and web accessibility. 
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We live in amazing times.