“Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today.”
How Interfaces Drive The Rise & Fall of Technology Companies
Our ability to converse with technology starts with the interface. It’s the space where interactions between human and machines occur. “In early computers, there was very little user interface except for a few buttons at an operator’s console,” wrote SearchSOA. “The user interface was largely in the form of punched card input and report output.” We’ve gone from this machine code to graphical interfaces and now a more sensory and immersive interface is upon us. The syntax and customs of communication between humans and machine have long catered to the machine, but as the technology for conversational user interfaces catches up to how humans communicate, we start to talk to our machines as if they are human.
The value of communicating with machines can not be understated. When Turing found a way to sort through millions of possibilities, uncovering the pattern in the German Enigma Machine, the entire complexion of World War 2 changed in favor of the Allies. We live in an information age, where the access to information depends on the ability to converse with machines. Without an interface, we can’t converse; for example, the uber powerful petaflop supercomputers lack an accessible UI layer to leverage their computing power, and so they are limited to simulating nuclear explosions or the creation of the universe… While useful, the petaflop computers mostly act super calculators rather than extensions of human ability. Could petaflop computing become a major breakthrough in modern technology? Maybe. But the major breakthroughs in technology depend on accessibility.
“What was so special about the Mac, we all know, was the graphical computer interface,” said Megan Smith, the Chief Technology Officer of The United States of America.
Much of the boom and bust of greatest technology companies can be mapped to the evolution of interfaces. When Xerox management team invited the 24 year old Steve Jobs to the HQ, he saw the graphical user interface (GUI) for the first time. “I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life,” said Steve Jobs. “Within 10 minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday.”
In The Triumph of the Nerds, Steve Jobs point blankly continued, “Basically they were copier heads — they had no clue about what a computer is or what it could do. So they just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the entire computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today.”
Apple Designer Bill Atkinson explained this catatonic shift, “A more graphical way of doing things would make the computer more accessible.” We can’t talk about interfaces without talking about accessibility. Who can access the computing power? How can they access it?
Let’s fast forward to how we access information today. More internet searches are done from our mobile devices than the desktop. The small screen first took the big stage with the launch of the iPhone on June 29, 2007. From 2010 to 2015, smartphones in America rose from 60 million to 190+ million. The graphical user interface as we knew it simply didn’t maximize the smartphone. The move from desktops to mobile became an interface problem as much as it was a technology problem. Early designs for mobile user interfaces did not always properly consider the physical interaction of human and machine. And the term “mobile user interface” emerged, but it did not capture how the we interacted with the technology. “A mobile user interface (mobile UI),” explainsTechTarget, “is the graphical and usually touch-sensitive display on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet, that allows the user to interact with the device’s apps, features, content and functions.” But this definition is outdated, it only encapsulates one of our five senses, sight. It did not take into account the speech recognition or AI capabilities of the smartphone. The modern interface is conversational user interface (CUI). This term captures the more sensory and immersive experience modern technology offers.
“As elegant and efficient as it is, the GUI (Graphical User Interface) still requires humans to learn a computer’s language. Now computers are finally learning how to speak ours,” wrote David Pierce in Wired 9.16.15.
When we check our email or browse the web, it’s one experience. Whether she started this morning on her laptop, continued on the smartphone on the bus, or then logged into another computer at work, the interconnectedness of our accessibility to the computer has never been greater. As users demand access to Facebook and Google across different devices, and the programs that call the APIs of Facebook, Google and other platforms, the development patterns change. The power of a platform is determined by the ease of which developers can build atop of what already exists. We live in a world where Slack launched a venture capital arm to invest in apps that are already building atop its platform. It’s not surprising as the top CRM (Salesforce) has well over a million privatized developers building on its platform, and has given away a million dollars (twice) during hackathons. Few developers build their own servers, or even set up their own databases. Projects get off the ground faster than ever before because developers don’t have to redo what’s already been built. The modern developer expects to build on the shoulders of giants (and startups).
Communicating with machines did not start with Captain Jean-Luc Picard ordering “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot” from the CUI of the USS Enterprise, and it is not going to end with Siri telling you the weather. We used to talk to the machine how machines want to talk, but now we can talk to machines how humans want to talk. It’s one conversation across all our devices. And more technology is being built so that other technologies can quickly make their apps hold the next conversation. My friends at Conversant Labs believe developers should be able to effortlessly add voice based operations to their apps, and we believe these services will advance the standard of the modern app, enabling people to accomplish feats not possible with just graphical based apps.
David Smooke represents ArtMap Inc. This post was originally published on the Conversant Labs Blog.
