This evening and for the second time I watched the amazing inspiring geeky movie The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest and I realized the amazing fact that the genius author of the Novel with the same name Po Branson predicted Cloud Computing and the Multitouch Surfaces and predicted the huge revolution that they would make to the computer industry as early as 1997, the year in which his novel was published, the movie was in theatre in 2002, still it is amazing how crystal he pictured the future.
In summary the film tells a story about a marketing hot shot "Andy" with an engineering degree, who got nostalgic to "Intellectuals with higher purposes" (as his 2nd girl friend in the movie put it) by getting back to the research field and involve in a life changing technology research project instead of making easy money in marketing ... a feeling the we engineers working in the ICT market usually get, we look back with passion to the days when things were simpler and we just focused on creating genuine ideas and great software even if we barely get paid for doing so, again "Intellectuals of higher purpose", got a ring to it, doesn't it?
Andy applies to the research labs of "La Honda" and he ends up with a team of geeks rejected by all major projects and were destined for failure because they lack the looks and the charisma. The team was assigned a left-over project of creating a 99$ PC for 3rd world kids, a noble purpose attached to an impossible target.
History does repeat itself all the time, this movie document the era of early 2000's right after 911 and few years after the the infamous .com crisis, in a time where all VCs and investors are in doubt and reluctant to hear any word that starts with a "re" and ends with a "search" or a ".com" that is why the 99$ PC seemed like a good project in the bad economy ... rings a bell? it is just like the circumstances in which Cloud Computing is thriving now after the mortgage crisis.
After a geeky-action packed story they end up with a miracle and cleverly shows the struggle of the entrepreneurs and the never ending battle with the investors and institutions monopolizing the market, a device in the size of a torch light, and that's it. Their motto was
"Simplify, Clarify, Economize"
so they put storage, processing and ram in cyber space, wow, that is cloud computing spelled out as early as 1997 guys, do you see the irony here. Next and to save more money they got rid of the Keyboard and Mouse and replaced it with a multitouch hologram, you can interact with icons and objects in thin air. I'm not sure that multitouch surfaces can even compete here, Microsoft Surface, and iPhone looks like stone age gadgets compared to the idea in the movie. You just twist your eMagi 2nd generation and "Let there be light", you have your desktop floating in front of you with 3D icons and movable objects, and a neat keyboard modeled in empty space so that you can type if you would have to, the laser beams detects the tip of your fingers when you reach inside the hologram to "touch the soul of your computer" as "Andy" put it in the movie.
I searched all over the web and I was not able to locate a single picture or a video that documents the magical revolutionary device "eMagi" from the movie, as if the world deliberately overlooked the insight and innovation in this novel.
This movie left me wondering how slow and late we are today, Cloud Computing is indeed here, still it doesn't play a major role in end user day to day computing yet. Still many small and medium size enterprises are already setting up their Cloud Office to save money in hard times, so that is one down.
Multitouch surfaces are still dull, buggy and expensive, and worst of all it is still a surface, having 2D written all over it. But thanks to bright people like Johnny Lee you can have a multitouch "space" and the charm is that you can have it at home with a Wiimote and a little piece of custom software the Lee open sources, "Big Ups" for Johnny Lee (quoting the movie), Watch him presenting his simple genius ideas on TED
So what is missing to realize eMagi 2nd generation, yes, you guessed it, the hologram display, can this be the answer to the need, or this new touchable hologram be the more fancy answer? I do hope so, I would hate to put my money into an Apple Mac Air just because it is thing and has solid state hard drive, I would like to get something really new when I get a new PC, not just the same old fat lazy machine, crippled by Windows 7.0 or Lazy Vista, and has a mind of its own, as if Microsoft and its operating system own your hardware, and if windows wishes to run a task of its own now, screw the user, his work got to wait because he is not as important as the Royal OS.
Or the other side of the coin a stable fast Linux that suffers frequent seizures because an update is need or an update is messed up or your hardware is not yet supported by the community. I have Fedora 10, running on a Fujitsu Siemens Laptop, all Intel Chipset, 2Gigs of RAM, Dual Core CPU and the works yet I'm not able to operate dual monitors in year 2009, not even with the help of Linux geeks fellows at work. We are living in hard times, we make advances really slow because innovation is crippled and the market is monopolized, no advances are made unless they works for the interest of giant corporates like Microsoft and Apple, who would come up with the eMagi 3rd generation, isn't it already overdue, we need it, 2009 Q2 is about to end, how will be the bright team that would quit their dull money making jobs and put on our desks the next generation of PCs? I wish it would be the open source community and every one would get a chance to add up to the ideas and the magic in the eMagi 3rd generation.
Don't we own a tribute to Po Bronson, you are the man, you saw it all coming, may be Microsoft and Google need to hire fiction writers to start creating innovative retail products and shake the dust off the industry
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