My uncle is a person that likes to use technology, he has always the newest computer, television, sound system, etc. I suppose that he has a good camera also, since I’ve just received by email five photos from him, the only problem is that each picture has almost 12MB.

Naturally he will share his images with friends and family, the expected result is for everyone to see the images, so it doesn’t need to be that big, as a user of technology he doesn’t need to know that.

We see a clear situation where hardware evolves much faster then software, we have a family of products that interacts with pictures, in this example email clients, and it yet doesn’t answer this problem. The correct behavior could be this email client understanding the profile of the user/place/recipients to identify the best size for these images and resize them.

Of course size is just a matter of time and location, in Japan where most of the population has very fast broadband internet connection, acceptable average size will be much higher then Afghanistan, where technology takes longer to arrive [today].

And if you think longer, you’ll see that you might have dozen devices on different connections, so what would be the correct behavior if I’ll check this email on my cell phone over 3G?

Will software ever evolve fast enough?

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