The Next Big Thing
Author: David Lane
Date: January 16th, 2005

The next big thing will probably come from the most unlikely of places! 

People are always searching for the next big thing in IT, the next niche market, so that they can get a band wagon moving and start minting money. One of the earliest examples, once the PC explosion got underway, was the spreadsheet 123 as pioneered by Lotus. It was ubiquitous and used for everything until Microsoft’s Excel came on the scene and, due to a misstep by Lotus, was able to dominate the spreadsheet market.  

Clearly having the next big thing was not the same as keeping it! 

There followed a quick profusion of new software packages that briefly dominated: Wordstar 2000 and WordPerfect, both of whom should have learned that less is more when Microsoft’s Word came along; Ashton Tate’s dBase I,II,III and IV held pre-eminence for some time, until it was eventually KO’d by the combination punch of FoxPro, later bought by Microsoft, and the much hyped Microsoft Access. Oddly Access did give rise to one of Microsoft’s few original ideas, Visual Basic, which managed to become the next big thing to an up and coming band of younger programmers. Everyone derides this rapid application development system but we all know how much fun it was to play with, especially at the start. 

Possibly the major next big thing of this earlier period was the Windows operating system. This was cadged from Apple who in turn had kinda sorta nicked it from Xerox where the concept was being tested for advanced copying systems. This is where Microsoft came into their own taking someone else’s idea and improving it to the point where it became a new thing. They then parlayed this into a method for controlling huge sections of the PC software market when they started packaging the packages and rolling out their Office Suite of Applications. In fact MS was so busy taken control of the known world that they almost missed the next big thing that came in the form of Netscape’s browser which presented the immensely flexible internet in a user friendly form. It was here that MS nearly came unstuck. So desperate were they to roll out their own browser and play catch-up that they started giving it away free, falling foul of the monopoly laws, and when even that did not seem enough, they began to internet enable everything they did. 

What many of them came to realise from this episode was that there can be a number of next big things happening concurrently.

When I began thinking about the next big thing on our horizon, I thought that I could look at the way such developments had gestated in the past and use that as a template for the future. I knew MS played a part in this but what took me a little by surprise was how much their business depended on it. They have a decided knack for recognising the next big thing, normally being developed by somebody else, and then copying and packaging it. 

And we, like magpies, always go for the packaging. 

In many ways this behaviour exemplifies how the next big thing comes about: it is rarely invented in its own time; instead an older idea is matured and re-invented to take the market by storm. Email for example, had been in use for years before it achieved the kind of sine qua non of business that it has now become. 

Similarly, take Instant Messaging and File Swapping. Both of these owe much of their origin to internet relay chat or IRC. Prior to the World Wide Web, IRC was a bulwark of instant communication: faster than email and cheaper than the phone. It allowed people all over the world to communicate with each other in real time. They could swap digital files of all flavours (music, games, applications) in this kind of anonymous limbo. IM or instant messaging packaged the real time communication of this and made it a business tool in the form of online help desks and intra-company communication systems. Voice over IP and Video on demand are the next generational developments of this process. Conversely the file swapping field has also been ploughed albeit on the shadier side of the law. 

It was a Eureka moment for me when I realised that in looking for the next big thing, I was more likely to find it by examining not the future but rather the past. 

The first thing that hooked me into computers was gaming. I had a ZX 81 with 1k of ram that seemed to be the most fascinating and inventive toy that I had ever played with. Even when I started programming I never really thought of it as work, moving happily from debugging telephone monitoring systems to trying out the latest first person shooter (games in which you control a character that kills everything you see are called first person shooters). All that changed when I started mudding. From that point onwards I was still happy writing my own programs, but no games I found could match the imaginary submersion and inventiveness of playing in a multi-user dungeon or MUD. 

MUDs are normally thematic in that they have a fairly defined environment. They might be based around Star Trek, the mythology of Middle Earth or the books of Terry Pratchett. Such an environment however merely provides a context as they are populated by other players - PC’s or Player Characters – and Non-Player Characters or NPC’s as well as buildings, cities and continents. When you first join a MUD, you are asked to create your own character. It is this character you develop as you move through the imaginary world, interacting with PC’s and NPC’s, completing quests, learning new skills and, if you are not careful, dying.

The general aim of a MUD is to develop the skills of your character by gaining experience, which is accumulated both with time and by achieving certain tasks. With better skills new areas of the game become accessible to your character along with new tasks. There is also a freeform element to the game in that most MUDs, while being text only, are richly detailed environments that are very attractive to explore. In fact most tasks are pursued by looking at different objects and following the trail they lead. Strangely, graphical MUDs are not as addictive because the graphics themselves are a barrier to your submersion in the environment. 

MUDs depend on curiosity and help develop imagination. 

It is, however, the graphical versions that are first being exploited by the commercial world. Already Microsoft is adding internet connectivity to their Xbox gaming console so that people can move beyond playing the game. The idea is to add variation by having players play each other using the game as the environment. Children will spend hours, in fact days playing these games, totally focused on what they are doing, learning the most arcane of game rules and back stories, even though they show very little concentration when at school. 

But, like I said earlier, next big things can develop concurrently. If we go back to the text version, which differentiates it from real life, and incorporate tasks that require players to know certain things to move forward, we could create an addictive learning environment. Imagine a MUD university where kids go for fun. Already MUDs by their very nature help people develop a wide range of desirable development skills. These include problem solving techniques as players figure out quests and developing social skills as players ask each other for help. MUD’s tend to replicate many of the social conventions we find in normal society as well as developing some interesting wrinkles of their own. 

More adult liaisons or teachers are always online and available for dealing with any problems that occur and to make sure that people treat each other civilly, but possibly the most intriguing element is that players can submit ideas and report bugs about the game itself. In this way the act of playing ends up improving the game.  

It sounds mad, but could a MUD University be the next big thing? 

No doubt many will scoff at this idea, heaping scorn aplenty until Microsoft MUD is released. 

And maybe, in truth, it is a bit far fetched – for the moment. So probably not the next big thing, but what about the one after that?

David Lane is a Systems Analyst and Consultant who has over 20 years experience in I.T.
Periodically he likes to exercise a lateral perspective on the industry.