He traded in his iPhone for a Blackberry. I have to remember that detail because it’s that which makes the least amount of sense.

I don’t understand the Blackberry. A tiny screen. A tiny keyboard. A confusing menu system and connectivity that is a pain to set up.

My colleague can’t give me an answer to explain his decision because I tend to shout at him when the topic rears its head.

I’m sure it has a future but deep down my feeling is that future will increasingly be shaped like an iPhone.

* * *

My wife does our food shopping. Each week she comes home angrier and angrier, telling me that yet another product range has been taken over by the Tesco own label brand. Where once she was loyal to a particular brand (remember when brands were simply “makes”?) now she is being forced into the arms of Mr Tesco.

She’s angry that Tesco create vast walls of a product which looks almost like the old, more established one.

The future is being shaped into a Tesco logo.

* * *

We are all guilty of wanting a simpler world. In the realm of the world-wide-web and even the wider world of email, we gravitate towards a simpler way of doing things. Often this means preferring to only buy our books from one place because we either see no value in personal service or else believe everybody is selling the same product anyway.

Last year a post by Seth Godin led Dave Trott to argue that the “perfect” social number of 150 (the number of meaningful relationships an individual can realistically maintain) could be extended to Twitter. I didn’t agree because I see Twitter as something to dip into rather than collect. But Seth’s précis of Dunbar’s Number is important for the way we develop socially on and off the web. As individuals and as groups we interact with only a small number of brands and as the web becomes bigger and bigger I believe, commercially at least, we search out fewer and fewer brands to interact with. These might shift as alliances are formed and broken or as new products come online but, by and large, we’ll continue to buy our books from Amazon over choosing the smaller bookshop; we’ll look to consolidate all our data in one area of the cloud; choose our clothes from just a small number of retailers and wait patiently for the single device which enables the vast majority of us to pursue our relatively simple pleasures.

Of course there are exceptions just as there are varied tastes there will always be a variety of stores and services. Just not as many as the global aspect of the Internet could allow for and not half as many as we might think.

There will be the Blackberry and there will be the iPhone and some may ask what the difference really is.

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