Removing Friction
With Google turning 15 last week, I've been pondering about just how much friction has been removed from our lives because of technology (and web technology in particular). Thanks to the web, many things that were once difficult, expensive, complicated or time-consuming have been made less of all of these things, and much of the inherent friction in these things has been dramatically reduced, and in some cases even eliminated completely. This removal of friction hasn't always been painless, and many industries have been decimated by the massive disintermediation that digital technology has brought to them. Take the music industry as an obvious example. In the space of about a decade, we've seen a huge shift from the idea of buying music on plastic disks to that of downloading music from "somewhere on the Internet", hopefully by still paying for it with some sort of subscription model like Spotify or Google Play All Access, but all too often pirated for free ...