(2010-12-02) Graham Tablets Ephemeralization

Paul Graham on Tablet-s.

• we'll end up calling these things is tablets. The only reason we even consider calling them "MobIle devices" is that the IPhone preceded the IPad (and the IPod Touch). If the iPad had come first, we wouldn't think of the iPhone as a phone; we'd think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.

• The iPhone isn't so much a phone as a replacement for a phone. That's an important distinction, because it's an early instance of what will become a common pattern. Many if not most of the special-purpose objects around us are going to be replaced by apps running on tablets... So for the next couple years, a good recipe for Start Up-s will be to look around you for things that people haven't realized yet can be made unnecessary by a tablet app... In 1938 Bucky Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software.