The Future of Compute was always Personal
The Future of Compute was always Personal
"How Smartphone Use Increases the Preference for Uniqueness"
It's been just over 16 years since the App Store launched (July 10, 2008!) with 500 apps. 16 years feels like a long time, but we're just at the beginning of personal computing.
I’m old enough to remember my family’s first computer as a family - a desktop Tandy 1000. When I went to university in 2003, I had a heavy immobile desktop computer in my dorm room - connected to the internet and tied to my desk with a thick ethernet cord. Then when I left to study in Turkey for a year in 2006, I bought my first laptop so I could take Compute with me.
Compute is really just an extension of thinking and decision-making. The first computers were humans who carried out very specific computational tasks. Then Personal Computers let every family, and every person, own and operate their own powerful set of informational and computational capabilities.
Mobile phones - smartphones - made it possible for computing to be Personal on an entirely new level.
Most thinking and decision-making doesn’t happen at a desk. It happens continuously over time and in very real-world contexts: as you walk through the aisles of a grocery store, as you sit in the back of a cab, or stand in line at an airport, while you’re running through a park, and while you’re sitting on the subway.
But that also means the standard for Compute is higher.
"Phone and Self: How Smartphone Use Increases the Preference for Uniqueness" - is a paper published August 3, 2022 in the Journal of Marketing Research. The authors suggest that "using them [smartphones] activates intimate self-knowledge and increases private self-focus, shifting attention toward individuating personal preferences, feelings, and inner states."
"...making choices using a personal smartphone, compared with a PC, tends to increase the preference for unique and self-expressive options."
The paper has a really interesting discussion of 'self-focus'. 🤔
"Private self-focus begets a sense of individuation because it entails focusing on “the unshared idiosyncrasies of [people’s] particular experiences”, the unique features that make people distinct from others, and their individual rather than social identities."
When everyone is sitting in front of their computer at a desk, the common and shared physical situation elicits the things you have in common. But when you use your phone, you’re continuously in a very specific and unique context (and your specific sequence of contexts is even more unique to you).
"Increased private self-focus leads to a more individuated self-view and decreases collective and deindividuated representations of self".
Hmmmm, "deindividuated representations of self"....
That sounds like "a Segment"!
Product managers and marketers use Segmentation, as a method and tool, to design their communication with their customers. Meanwhile their users are looking to their phones to emphasize and accentuate their own individuality. 🤳
Sounds like the recipe for a happy and long-term relationship! 😅
😖😖😖
As the authors put it:
"It is well-established that consumers tend to choose options that are congruent with their self-perceptions and avoid options that appear incongruent with who they are. Because smartphone use increases private self-focus and, consequently, a sense of distinctiveness, it should lead people to prefer more distinctive options."
If you run your user interface and messaging by using Segmentation - displaying information to users based on what large segments of others want and treating individual people like the other million+ people in their Segment - then you're stuck in a groove that runs increasingly counter to the present and future. 😲
We’ve had a hardware revolution - from large computers, to small computers (sitting on your lap), to constantly moving back and forth between your hand and your pocket. Smart watches, glasses, and other smaller devices are here and around the corner.
But our software is lagging behind and still forces developers and builders to think in terms of rigid and generic Segments and ‘journeys’.
Agentic AI is the next revolution and its destiny is to make Compute truly Personal.
Sources
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4108271
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00222437221120404