You can drop it from 10 stories! You can submerge it underwater at a depth of 20 feet for 30 minutes! You can hammer a nail with it!

Just make sure you don’t tap the side of an aquarium four times!

Or a return to our Neolithic past?

After reading Charles’ Business Predictions for 2010 and Beyond on the Next Level Purchasing Blog, I have to wonder.

Now, I usually skip “prediction” and “resolution” posts, just as I rarely write them myself (especially around the New Year, I don’t like working on an artificial clock, especially one out of sync with natural cycles), but I know that Charles usually puts thought into everything he writes (even if I don’t agree with it), and isn’t one to push the “post” button on every thought that pops into his head, so I decided to read it. And while I fully agree with predictions (2) and (3), as the airline industry just can’t survive in it’s current form and the amount of value coming out of many of the current purchasing organizations, especially from a certification perspective, is questionable, I was taken aback at prediction (1).

I predict that, just as media went the way of the dinosaur, the devices will either be reduced to one or will go away all together by the end of the decade.

Charles is giving us 50-50 odds that devices are going away all together!

Since I don’t see our ever increasing addiction to media in all it’s various forms decreasing, yet alone disappearing, we’re still going to need something to absorb it. If we take away the device, that only leaves our brain. So either we’re going to become a Johnny Mnemonic capable of hacking our own brains, or we’re going to become Borg and absorb the device.

Now, I could be wrong … we could reach a point of information overload, take a few lessons from the Amish, get rid of all our technology, and begin a slow devolution towards a Neolithic culture. That too would increase our device dependency to zero.

Either way, I hope the odds of zero devices is a lot less than 50!