The next big thing isn’t some killer application, device, or service. Pursuing that path is old school thinking which limits the potential of all involved, from developer, to investor to customer.

Why I believe this to be true, what we might do differently, and how this affects the software developer is what this talk is about.

One way to start is to ponder the following five questions:

• What if things just worked?
• What if they just worked together?
• What if they worked together seamlessly?
• What if in working together, there was a significant increase in their cumulative value?
• What if in working together, there was a significant decrease in their cumulative complexity?

Here’s the deal. The market is about to become overwhelmed by the cumulative complexity of an ever expanding wave of individually delightful, simple, useful, affordable, desirable technologies. And paradoxically, the more delightful, simple, useful, affordable, desirable we make them, the sooner the resultant collapse will happen – and that is either despite, or because of, the short-term financial or scientific benefits.

Just because things are connected – be they suburban houses on the Roadnet, or digital devices on the Internet – does not mean that they have any meaningful sense of community, much less viable structure to address needs or desires by way of cooperatively leveraging the potential strengths of each. Connected ≠ community. As it is with people, so can it be with technology: the power of the social – when appropriately aligned – can trump that of the individual.

If we do not rethink how we design software, how we think about applications, and if we fail to take the 5 questions into account in every software decision that we make going forward, my guess is that we have, at most, 5 years, before we reach this threshold. When we do, our entire industry will stall. This defines how much time we have, not to react, but to have already made the necessary changes in our approach.