How the cloud killed the era of tangible intangibles

Software’s rather brief commercial history, as even if extremely loosely defined, is only a hundred years or so old at most.  This short run seems to be rapidly evolving into the oft-theorized brave new world: an end-state of medialess-ness.  Most people and companies who have been involved in software development, up until very recently, have pushed their “soft” product in an oxymoronic “hard” shrink-wrapped box of some sort – all to generate traceable revenue at the cash register.  Even the mighty (and once-mightier) Microsoft still sells physical license key cards for its software products, all the while clinging to whatever other shrink-wrapped products they can continue to push on their customers, even as they pivot and shift to the digital economy and distribution methods with their Xbox live services and others.

With the 21st century advent of the iOS platform & OSX app Store, and the Chrome apps and Firefox addons, Blackberry apps, & app ad nauseum now – the days of shrink-wrapped physical “soft” products, seems to be coming to an end.  The “Apps-revolution” is nothing more than the realization of a fully digital distribution economy, known now as “The Cloud”.  This seems to be a fairly huge development, as technology and humanity are evolving before our very eyes – looking back, for the past 4o years or so (ever since the 8-track took over from the LP) – humanity has spent an untold amount of resources consuming products, which were completely and literally intangible & ethereal.  This mostly magnetic-based technology  was something of magic – for only with the appropriate interfacing technologies, would these devices and items be of any use.  (Say, I have this great item you just have to experience, on this 5.25″ floppy disk…)

An example of how past media becomes only useful as art components.

All too often the objects consumed become waste and recycled into art projects and more, as they lose their utility with each new technological wave and become something the next generation disposes of.   The physical items themselves which were obtained were essentially all the same – some sort of flimsy, silver, or brown-ish “plastic” in some kind of container, be it a flat, found disc, or a long ribbon, or something else we couldn’t make heads or tails of with any of our human senses.  The technologies, mostly some kind of magnetic media based formats, be they analog or digital,  all replaced prior technologies which were physical – punch cards had holes in cards we could see and hold and read, in our hands.  The LP was a disk of vinyl, which had an audio groove on it we could see – yes it’s tiny, but it’s there.

All of the new media replacements were not of our physical world – we could only see their containers, but not truly see the content itself. We could hold the intangible in our hands, in an almost cellular format, each of us being sold our own “copy” of whatever item we desired – be it Beethoven symphonies or WordPerfect floppies.  Bach on an 8-track tape really looks not much different than a floppy disk drive media’s disc full of data – both are a brown, plastic based, nearly 2 dimensional piece of magnetic media.  Or  to put it another way, all CDs or DVDs are 5″ plastic discs – which for the most part – the actual contents contained within via optics wizardry, are essentially indistinguishable with our human senses.

The Intangible becomes Tangible – There’s always been a type of cognitive dissonance associated with the experience of buying a cardboard box, shrink-wrapped in plastic, inside of which was a media container – for soft-ware of any sort.   In the mid ’90s music companies did away with the large CD box supposedly in an effort to be more environmentally conscious – consumers were simply being slowly weened from this “stuff”.  Music, Movies & Software seem to be rather ethereal, existing only inside the transistors of our computers, and only useful in an electronic device. (Antikythera mechanism not withstanding.)  Now that we have a worldwide inter-connected network, and with it, a global digital distribution model, the era of purchasing the intangible, on tangible media, seems to be coming to a most welcome twilight.

Examine the history of audio commercialization evolution:

Wax cylinders -> Phonographs -> LP Records -> 8-track-cassette -> cassette tapes -> [|| digital revolution ||] CDs -> Digital Storage Media -> CLOUD

Software Sales:

(Digital by definition) Shrink-wrap boxes (floppies) ->Shrink-wrapped boxes (CDs) ->Shrink-wrapped boxes (DVDs) -> CLOUD

A distribution model which passes the savings onto the consumer, and enables direct to producer sales, without ever having to physically render their software product to get paid.  Software remains soft, as it should.    In the late 80s, there were whole industries of software sellers and re-sellers – the middle-men in the distribution network who are no longer needed.  They were slowly replaced by big box stores and other online retailers (I always found it so odd to buy software in a “box”, especially in recent years & over the internet where i would have to wait for the product to be mailed to me).  The cloud usurps all.   It seems somewhat ironic that the undoing of software’s physical manifestation is committed by something itself so ethereal it’s called “The Cloud.”