Phone support from my almost 9 year old

We hit the tipping point tonight with my 8.89 year old son as we watched him provide phone support to his grandmother for using iMovie. I felt amazement and awe. I listened to the discussion intently as he took his time to understand the problem, explained the solution and walked his grandmother through the needed steps to get her going. At one point he even asked if it is OK for him to go to his Mac to assist more accurately. At the end he acknowledged that “After-all, I am the iMovie expert in this house!” My favorite quote of the night is:

“Are you good to go without me?”

It is mind-boggling to think how technology and people-friendly innovations are changing the landscape as we speak. Boundaries between the generations are blurring as technologies are becoming ever more pervasive and ubiquitous.

Don’t get me wrong, he is not just interested in all the new cool gadgets or games. Right now, his favorite activity is to play his dad’s old school games, starting with the original Zork. Remember DOS? The last commercial version of DOS was released in 1995 by IBM. Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition is the last version of a DOS-based Windows OS which was released in 2000 and was officially discontinued in 2006. In mere 5-years, if that, technology is completely made irrelevant. Think about it, product lifecycles are continuously shrinking… Without a managed innovation pipeline, what new ideas, products, services and businesses will you be bringing to the market continuously?

Maybe it is the engineer gene in him that is bringing back all the old cool stuff. In a way, we are reliving the pioneering days of computers through our son’s eyes. Ok, that is little exaggerated …