It's 2009 or so. Paul, Peter, myself and a former project manager named Dennis arrive in Phoenix, Arizona and we are hungry. It's 5pm on a Sunday and the ultra budget Hotel doesn't offer anything remotely resembling "room service". These were different times for our company.
Also it's hot. 110 degrees in the shade hot. So hot that it doesn't take long to realize that "shade" is a meaningless term in a place like Phoenix. Only air conditioning can save you, shade alone is useless. People will tell you: it's a dry heat. Maybe, but when it's 110 degrees outside, your glasses have fogged over and you are sweating from head to toe, it's really not a "dry" heat anymore.
So we pile into a rented van and we head downtown. Now this is 2009 or so. Pre iPhone. Peter and I have our fancy feature phones. Paul and Dennis have Blackberries. They are not helping us. We are not looking to our phones and the internet to help us answer any questions. There are no clouds to offer their know it all services, just as there are no clouds in the sky.
Everything is closed. We are walking around what appears to be a California style open air mall, or maybe it’s just downtown Phoenix, we can't really tell. It's quiet, too quiet. The streets are deserted. Not a soul in sight. It's a ghost town. It's like a desert inside a city inside a desert. There is no wind and not many trees.
Touching, anything, is out of the question, unless it's ice. Everything seems to be made out of some sort of reddish high tech clay material. I remember thinking, what a city of the future a place like Phoenix already is. Settlements on Mars will probably look like this. Global warming? Welcome to Phoenix!
Then we smell it. The sweet, sweet smell of hamburger on a grill, which means three things in Phoenix: food, air conditioning and not dying. We turn the corner and are stopped in our tracks by a giant bleary eyed owl. We have been wandering for almost an hour, possibly hallucinating and are staring, speechless at a Hooters restaurant, and it's open. After scratching our heads for a second or two Paul declares that we can't go in. We have to find someplace else he says. But we are dying Paul, we say. Nobody "wants" to go to Hooters. But he will not budge.
So we walk around for another 1/2 an hour or so. We eventually find a few locals. Actual people. All with the same story. Is there anything open?, we ask. No, only Hooters. Well maybe this one other place. We go to the one other place, its closed. There is only Hooters.
Eventually Paul, realizing that Hooters is our only option other than certain death, accepts defeat and gives in. And to no ones surprise it was awful. The oasis of cool air and ice water was by far the best thing about the place. It was all downhill from there. The food was limp and sweating grease. Each bite seemed less of a good idea than the last. No one, including the staff, wanted to be there. It was uncomfortable. We ate, and mostly drank as fast as we could and left without looking back.
Today my goal was to simply relate a story of a time and a place, and transport you there using sensory language.
So what have we and what can we take from this story?
#1 Our company is a much different company today, than it was in 2009. Hooters is not.
#2 Arizona is hot and its not getting any cooler anytime soon.
#3 The world is a much different place than it was in 2009.
Had this story unfolded just a short time later, it would have been a completely different story. Paul, Peter, Dennis and I might still be stuck in Arizona on a Sunday night dying of hunger and heat stroke, but with an iPhone in hand, we might have had a fighting chance.
#4 Touch started the revolution.
Our fingers can draw images on our brains in the same way our eyes do. Touch is mapping. In the years before the smartphone, both the internet and handheld computers existed. But it was touch that brought them together and made it truly happen. Before we could touch it, we couldn't see it.
Steve Jobs famously announced that the original iPhone would have no apps. That’s because he hadn't been touching one long enough yet.
#5 Mapping services are shaping our existence.
maps.google.com alone has accounted for a monumental shift in human behavior. Those same Google maps that could have led us to someplace, anyplace other than Hooters in 2009, are now the technology at the core of the driver less car that could also drive us there today.
For instance, we are not teaching cars to drive themselves anymore, the cars can already do that. We are proving to them that what's in our world is real, over there a tree, up ahead an intersection, across the road a building with a Denny's inside, over there a monument.
In the end my goal is, as always, to inspire you. But I urge you not to be inspired by the state of today's or tomorrows technology, but of the promise of what people will do with it. People like Steve Jobs, people like you and me.