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Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Posted by Roberto
10:01 PM 0 comments

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COOL AND WOW

The following is an excerpt from Kevin Maney's article "Where, oh, where has the wow gone? Transcending 'cool' requires 2 things", published by USA Today.

There's a difference between cool and wow. Cool is design. It's incremental. Sony's new PlayStation Portable, unveiled at CES, is cool. It takes handheld gaming to the next level. But it doesn't transform portable game playing or open up grand new possibilities.

Wow was Napster, which blew the doors open for online music. Wow was Mosaic -- the first graphical Web browser -- which made people realize the Internet could be used by everyone. Wow was the BlackBerry, which meant you could get e-mail anywhere, not just at your desk.

Once astronauts landed on the moon, the space station and the shuttle didn't seem very exciting. Similarly, after the Internet, TV on a cellphone seems like no big whoop. It's kind of expected.

Real wows require two things to happen, and neither seems to be apparent at the moment.

First, someone has to invent a radical enabling technology -- hardware or software that's not much good on its own but can be used to build something that's never been built before. The microprocessor and MP3 compression for music were both enabling technologies.

Then, someone has to take that enabling technology and invent a life-altering way to use it. MP3 made it possible for Shawn Fanning to launch Napster from his dorm room. Apple Computer and others latched onto the microprocessor and created the PC. The PC changed our life.

An enabling technology might be magnetic random access memory, or MRAM. IBM, Cypress Semiconductor and Freescale are all working on it. Over the next five to seven years, MRAM is supposed to make it possible to store 400 times more data in the same space as today's smallest, densest hard drives.

An MRAM iPod wouldn't just hold all the music you own -- it might be able to hold all the music ever recorded. An MRAM iPod would be cool. But someone might come up with a way to use MRAM that is completely different and nearly unimaginable today. That would be wow.