New Modes of Interaction

Dan Bricklin¹ has been thinking about some implications of Microsoft Natal and Google Wave:

Every decade or so there has been a change in interaction styles between computers and their users. This change impacts both what the user sees and what the programmer needs to do when architecting an application. This change is brought about by innovations in both hardware and software. At first, mainly new applications are created using this new style, but as time goes on and the style becomes dominant, even older applications need to be re-implemented in the new style.

I believe that we are now at the start of such a change. The recent unveilings, within days of each other, of Google Wave (May 28, 2009) and Microsoft Natal (June 1, 2009), brought this home to me. This essay will explore what this new style of interaction will be like in light of the history of such steps in style, why I feel it is occurring, and when it will have an impact on various constituencies. [...]

For the record, I could care less about Project Natal until Microsoft show us how they propose to apply it to non-gaming systems. Google Wave, on the other hand, looks quite fascinating.

1. a.k.a. the co-inventor of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet for personal computers. ^