3pointD.com

Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble has a long and very perceptive post on his blog (and on WebProNews, via Glitchy) that’s mostly about how Microsoft can become a leaner, kinder and gentler technology machine, and take away the “karmic power” of the blogger known as “Mini-Microsoft” (who is not a fan of the company). What interests me more about the post, however, is how Scoble characterizes the generation that’s just about to enter high school. He calls it “the Second Life generation” — although readers of this blog know it better as the 3pointD generation. I’m not sure if even Scoble realizes just how 3pointD they’re going to be, though.

Scoble describes them thus:

They live in a world of always connected high-speed broadband. In a world that has computers that have more graphical power than our most powerful ones just 10 years ago. Where ubiquitous computing isn’t a far-off-dream, but something pushed in their face every minute of every day as they see digital displays in classrooms, in shopping malls, in airports, and at movie theaters. They expect their cell phones to do a lot more than just phone their parents. They carry around laptops or Tablet PCs or, maybe soon, ultra mobile PCs that are hooked up through increasingly ubiquitous wireless networks.

These are the people Microsoft will have to please to remain competitive. But Microsoft will have a lot of catching up to do if it’s to compete in the 3pointD world:

It is a world where they [the 3pointD/SL generation] want to make their own experiences. MySpace looks passe to this new generation. Second Life, with its 3D world that can not just be controlled, but produced factory style from pre-built components, along with easy customizations, is where it’s at.

The only place I’d really take issue with Scoble (other than in terminology) is where he describes SL as a world that can be “produced factory style from pre-built components, along with easy customizations.” This is a mischaracterization of Second Life, and a mischaracterization of the 3pointD generation.

What’s great about SL is that it doesn’t provide the kind of factory-style components that Microsoft tends to be fond of, but instead makes a available a set of much more basic, low-level building blocks that give the user far more control. As Scoble almost points out, this is what the 3pointD generation will be after. They’ll be right down in the atoms and ions of the world and they’ll be loving it. Okay, so they won’t all be monkeying around under the hood. But as the technology becomes more powerful, so will its users.

I realize this contravenes the prevailing wisdom, that more powerful technology generally gives rise to a dumbed-down user base, people who prefer to let the technology do their thinking for them, but I’m more optimistic than that. Look at the recent evidence: Most of the coolest new tools of Web 2.0 — stuff like blogs, tagging, various other kinds of social software and new ways to publish and connect — were developed not by the technological machine (in the form of big companies like Microsoft) but by individuals and small groups of people working together toward some goal they thought was cool.

No, you don’t have to know any HTML to knock together a smart-looking MySpace page, but that’s not my point. My point is that the ability to develop new technologies for a mass audience is now in the hands of more people than ever before. And 10 years from now, when the 3pointD generation is graduating from college, that ability will only have grown, in both power and breadth. Today’s pre-teens are going to be changing tomorrow’s world almost on the fly, at a pace we couldn’t even keep up with. And it’ll happen because places like Second Life and its even more versatile descendants will evolve into something that gives them that power — just as the Internet has evolved into a Web that allows pretty much anyone to create something like Digg.com.

It’ll be interesting to see if Scoble can pull Microsoft into Second Life and the 3pointD world, and more interesting to see what they do there. But it’ll be yet more interesting still to see what the SL/3pointD generation do in the place. Even the slimmed-down and agile Microsoft that Scoble envisions in his post will be hard-pressed to keep up with that.