Obsolescence

While swapping cars with one of my peers, I had to come back running and ask her to provide her keys for the second vehicle, which I did not bring with me. I started thinking about why we need keys for a car, and then some other similar parts/devices in order to start, turn on, or make something function.

With so much technology available nowadays, why do we still need to carry around metallic keys for cars? Or doors?
When visiting a hospital or business, why do we still need to sign on a sheet of paper at the reception to state our name and the reason for our visit? Most of the plastic cards we carry around already contain our main information, wouldn’t it be simpler to just swipe our ID or even a credit card to let them know who we are?
How about disks? CDs, DVDs, Blue-rays, etc. Wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper for the big entertainment and software manufacturers to invest all that money spent on creation and distribution of such devices into networking technologies, so that we get the electronic files quickly and easily without the need to have to insert a piece of plastic into mechanical trays or slots?

How about newspapers and magazines? The Kindle is out, Sony Reader too, PDAs have better resolutions now... and we still receive newspapers and all kind of resource-intensive publications in our doorsteps and mailboxes. How come nobody in the newspaper industry distributes one of such readers just once? That would allow the unit to update daily or weekly using any kind of wireless technology, so that we do not have to recycle and waste so much every single day.

Have they ever read about what the words “vision” and “innovation” mean?

I could rant on and on with so many examples; I can’t believe we are almost into the completion of the first decade after the turn of the century and we are still carrying so much baggage from the previous one.

Well... you get the idea. I wish the next time you read about the latest innovations on these subjects you do it on a Kindle-like unit.

As the latest Mac ads state: Cheers! To innovation