What does computing look like in the age of the modern Internet? Let’s start with the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. This law of physics represents the different states and forms of energy in a finite space-time. To wit, the two core concepts of Entropy and Conservation are interesting to Software and the Internet.
Like the law of Entropy, the Software that is not widely used regularly will rapidly lose value and degrade exponentially. It will quickly be overtaken by better, cheaper, and more accessible solutions. As denoted by the law of Entropy it is very difficult to go from disorder to order, which is to say it’s hard to retrofit outdated software to make it modern.
Many companies have tried and failed? Well, many have tried and died, or as I would like to say borg’d depending on whether you are a fan of Dune or Star Trek. The software that does not innovate at the pace of the Internet will not thrive or survive.
What about the law of Conservation? It states basically more things change more things stay the same. Or things may change from state to state but on whole, they don’t gain or lose anything.
This definition of Conservation may appear contradictory to the experience of an Internet-driven social economy, but let’s compare and contrast. In the past, people had to be ambulant (physically have to go and do something) to buy or socialize. This expended lot of energy and time and frequently people tended to subconsciously or consciously evaluate RIO before acting, which limited the number of participants.
In the modern age of the connected-all-the-time, the amount of energy required for the same task per person has reduced significantly. Try wishing someone a happy birthday on Facebook versus what you had to do before Facebook. As per the law of Conservation, all these per task heavy energy consumptions have been segmented into smaller, specialized, and quicker chunks into significantly more participants for the same amount of total energy expended. Much better ROI for each participant.
With the reductions of heavy energy barriers, transitioning to the same tasks on the Internet with a fraction of expended energy has created a new critical-mass ecosystem of social and business opportunities.
With the advent of the services anytime and anywhere, the expectation of users for data availability, speed, and intuitive interface has gotten to a point where any service latency is seen as a failure. With low user energy investment for the tasks, Internet-based services can lose customer loyalty with almost no energy cost to the users.
