Why we Architect for Experiences

Change is afoot once again. We've heard a ton about 5G for the last couple years, and we're just now starting to see this technology emerge in the market. Plenty of pundits have speculated that 5G is going to have the same magnitude of impact as the introduction of the web or the birth of mobile computing. Last week, we saw Facebook launch a major rebranding last week. The Metaverse is coming, powered in part by that same 5G network.

What's the connection to 5G? Edge computing and experiences. In this article from Ericsson, Peter Linder cites 5G as a key enabler for AR and VR without the use of a tethered PC. Few of us can imagine how our business applications will take advantage of experiences like this, but recall that just a few years ago, we'd have had a hard time imagining the rich mobile applications we take for granted today.

These new experiences aren't going to take the place of the experiences we've got today -- they're going to add to them. If you're not already seeing the same explosion in channels, that's coming, too. Partners, new brands, bundled products -- all these channels demand access to the capabilities you've got, packaged up in new ways.

There's no way to support this explosion without careful separation of experiences from capabilities. You should never see the mechanisms by which a command is carried out implemented in the same place your customer experiences it!

Spotify has some great experiences enabled by this sort of separation. I was streaming from my desktop PC this week through my "good" speakers (better than my laptop!), but I also had a Spotify window open on my laptop. I just happened to see the play list sync'ed to the laptop screen, and when I clicked next there, my session on my desktop followed right along. Although this is an ultra-simple example, it's evidence that Spotify is using its interfaces to send Commands to a back-end service -- nothing about the session that's streaming is connected to the commands at all -- otherwise, the audio source would have changed!

At this point, a little faith may be required in order to see a need like this in your enterprise, but for those with preparation on their side, I believe a myriad of new experiences will be possible in a few short years.

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