It seems that technology evolves much like organic life does, in punctuated spurts. It seems that technology remains steady, stationary, dormant even, and then all of a sudden the world of consumer electronics changes around you. This year, 2015, appears to be a punctuated growth period for technology globally. With computer devices across all form factors expected to move over 2.5 billion units this year, the several year old smart watch becoming mainstream instead of novel, and the cloud powering more and more of our programs, applications, and services, the world sure is different than it was 10 years ago.

Here at Multi•New•Media, we're awaiting the launch of
Windows 10 from Microsoft later this month, and waiting to see what the Redmond, WA. company has in store for its dismal phone business and its newest potential hit, the HoloLens. We're watching Apple to see what other already-existing consumer devices they can convince average consumers into adopting after already ushering the masses to smart phones, tablets, and watches. We're watching Nokia in the post-Microsoft acquisition days. We're watching Samsung and their continued desire to rid themselves of reliance upon Google's Android platform. And speaking of Google, we're watching to see just when that-which-went-up (Android) will start to come down. Google has already clearly stated that search volumes have peaked unless we either put search capable devices into the billions of human hands that don't already have them or unless we can force existing searchers to somehow violate the laws of time and search more per day than they already do.

Let's look at all of that again from another perspective. Microsoft is the behemoth who was crippled but is rising again. Apple is the Wizard of Oz who is slowly having the curtain drawn open in front of the top-dollar-paying mystified masses. Google is a corporate experiment like no other before, where market saturation is absolute and growth can not organically occur without encroaching upon new markets. Samsung, Lenovo, Dell, HP, HTC, and all of the rest are locked in their continued reliance upon a supreme operating system de jour.

Okay, so maybe not much changes on the business side, but from the consumer side, wow! Holograms, smart watches, anything (digital) I've ever wanted dirt cheap and at the touch of a button thanks to the cloud. It is hard to not draw some parallels to 20 years prior. Way back when, in 1995, when Microsoft changed the world with Windows 95, Apple began the need to soul search after an amazing run of success, and, well, Google didn't exist back then but Netscape did... and as tired as you must be of hearing that correlation, I'm equally as tired of saying it.

Each time history repeats itself we get better and better toys. These days, I find myself enjoying the price drops that we get increasing our access to more and more devices and experiences, but I also find myself wondering if there isn't some other price that we're all paying that doesn't involve money.

I'll leave you to think about that for a bit, and to leave your thoughts and findings below in the comments.