Three Consumer Products That Changed the World

In this era in which technology develops faster than a baseball player’s steroid fueled backne and man-boobs, it is difficult to narrow down the best of the countless products that have excited consumers. There are different criteria for selecting candidates, such as best selling, most innovative, or simply the most fun to use. But since high sales is not an indication of innovation or even quality, and innovation is not necessarily an indication of usefulness or fun, it is better to look at it in a more abstract way. What products have had the greatest impact on our lives? Is it the creepy little Furbies that showed us a glimpse of a future in which our closest friends are objects with personalities? Or is it the iPhone, which cost more than a computer when it was launched yet was capable of less than what a freebie phone could do but still had consumers in an ignorant frenzy? Both of these iconic gadgets were huge sellers and were innovative in different ways, but they did not have the same effect on the cultural landscape. The iPhone, as much as it is an overpriced, over hyped waste of a great advance in touch screen technology, still had a far reaching effect on the cell phone industry’s future. The Furby on the other hand, however it may have haunted our nightmares of living dolls and robots running amok, was little more than a fad and a brief glimpse of what our grandchildren may be playing with. Here we examine three products of the past 25 years that changed the world.
The first is that great savior of video games, the original Nintendo Entertainment System. This unassuming little grey box, commonly known as the NES, made possible the sleek consoles of today that power games with eerily realistic looking characters and worlds, with musical scores written by famous composers and performed by a full orchestra. It ushered in a new era for video games that continues to grow today, with some games such as Halo 3 dwarfing the opening day revenue of most movies. When the NES was released in 1985, the video games industry had peaked and collapsed and was considered by most to be at the end of its popularity. The whole industry of video games had begun to carry a stigma associated with its name. But Nintendo took a different marketing approach by releasing peripherals with the NES that made it seem more like a toy than a video game. It released what it dubbed the Power Glove that was touted as a virtual reality glove, a light gun to shoot at objects on the screen and a pad on which gamers could run in place to make the on screen character run track and field events. The strategy worked and the NES became wildly popular. Other companies began making game consoles and soon the industry was alive again. It is likely that video games wouldn’t be what they are today if Nintendo had not found a way to make the NES the monumental success that it was.
The next consumer icon on our brief countdown sparked a revolution in a way similar to the NES; by changing the way we interact with a technology already established. Ironically, it was the rather primitive iPhone that changed the landscape of the cell phone industry. Yes, primitive is a correct adjective to describe the iPhone. There are 13 different things the iPhone can't do that most other phones on the market can do, at half the cost or less, including things most people take for granted like sending picture messages, and shooting video clips. The iPhone is a remarkable example of what hype and marketing can do for an inferior product and how human nature is to favor "cool" over functional. Although the iPhone is retro in its features, it did play an important role in the evolution of cell phones. Its touch screen technology was previously unparalleled. It reads the electrical energy in your fingertips rather than relying on your finger breaking an infrared beam. This means that two fingers can operate the screen at the same time without confusing the device’s software and it understands the differences between an accidental brush across its screen and an intentional touch. This made the device so cool and so much fun to interact with, and simply easier to operate than anything else gadget geeks had ever seen. Since then, other touch screen technologies have been developed that compare but the iPhone’s popularity forced cell phone manufacturers to examine their design concepts. All the major cell phone carriers have released iPhone clones or are planning to and there are several other variants of touch screen phones now on the market. More are in the works for the more distant future as well and it seems inevitable that touch screen is the way most or all interactive personal devices will be controlled in the future. Nokia even has in the works a new type of morphing plastic, somewhat reminiscent of the liquid metal bot in Terminator 2. Nokia also recently formed the Symbian Foundation, a collaboration of cell phone manufacturers, carriers and software developers working together to create a mobile phone platform to compete with Android and iPhone's OS X interface. The iPhone raised the bar so much that it caused the rest of the industry to revolutionize its design model, rather than continuing to create ever more advanced versions of the same basic concept. So while the iPhone is really nothing more than a basic but extremely cool phone, it can proudly say it changed the world, or at least the world of personal electronics.
The final in our triumvirate of great cash vampires is something that is still at the beginning of its life cycle but seems poised to chang the future of the world and indirectly save countless lives. The gas/electric hybrid car is the beginning of the end for oil companies', and oil producing countries', domination of the world. It is also the beginning of a cure for our pollution problem that we have known for decades would slowly destroy the world yet has been largely disregarded until the current generation. Hybrid cars may not be the final answer in the battle against the robber baron oil companies that hang us by our collective feet and shake until they get every last penny from our pockets, but it certainly is the beginning of the rebellion. Wars are fought over the lucrative oil reserves that all governments want to control. It is impossible to know exactly how many soldiers and bystanders have been killed or had their lives otherwise shattered directly or indirectly in these wars, or how many will face the same fate in the future. But the day is dawning when we will no longer depend on these ill gotten gains for our livelihood. It seems as if the oil companies know this as they have doubled the cost of our desperately needed gasoline in the past decade, presumably to maximize profits while we still have no choice but to pay their price. So let them milk every dollar they can out of us while they can because in the next generation, they will be a shadow of their current glory and we will have saved lives in wars never fought and potentially the planet itself. What other consumer product could dream of boasting that?
The past 25 years have seen the introduction of so much change in technology, it would take a whole set of encyclopedia sized volumes to attempt at discussing all of them and their impact. The changes in this 25 year set far out pace that of any other period in recorded history. If technology continues to change this fast in the next 25 years, there is simply no way the human mind can fathom what is in store for us. These three consumer products are but three mile markers on a highway of technological breakthroughs that crisscrosses the globe. Yet they remain icons that will never be forgotten and whose influence will always be felt; three mile markers that will forever loom large in our rear view mirror.