Ecosystem fatigue

The heart of the matter For the past few years, tech has progressively filled me with different types of ‘fatigue’. Now it’s the turn of ecosystem fatigue. The initial ‘digital hub’ vision made a lot of sense at the time. As Steve Jobs said, the Mac with its capabilities gives value to all the satellite devices we use (or used at the time) — CD and DVD players, digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players, camcorders — and also interconnects them. The example he made was the synergy between a device like a camcorder and an application like iMovie. But, like many other things tech touches, this had to morph into an ‘ecosystem’ where for all the things you want to do with satellite devices, now you can use an Apple device. Convenient, sure, but then these companies want more and more out of it, they want to be present everywhere you look, with everything you use in your personal spaces. Having the convenience of seamlessly pulling and pushing files across different devices is one thing; having a…