There is no "tech". Get over it.

Via SmartMobs, regarding our millenials:

“Young people don’t see “tech” as a separate entity - it’s an organic part of their lives,” said Andrew Davidson, vice president of MTV’s VBS International Insight unit.

“Talking to them about the role of technology in their lifestyle would be like talking to kids in the 1980s about the role the park swing or the telephone played in their social lives — it’s invisible.”

The more you get into "tech", the more you realize there's no such thing. As any systems analyst will tell you: there are processes, and some pieces of them are automated and some aren't. Some pieces have hardware components, and some don't. Some storage is on paper, and some on tiny electric switches.

The process is inviting your friends out for a drink. It's not using the telephone in drink invite mode. You don't start out and say I need a product to invite my friends out for beers and optionally gin and tonics. And we don't really worry that the phone is from one vendor, and the cab you take down to the bar is from another.

What we say is -- hey, wouldn't it be neat if instead of having to call everybody seperately I could communicate with them all at once? And slowly that process evolves...

What's my point? I suppose it's that from a process standpoint, if we see our personal algorithms as the higher order application, loose coupling has been the norm, more than we realize. And given the worldview of the current crop of kids, we're likely to get back to that. And that's a good and powerful thing.