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Self-organizing mobs

Via smartmobs.com,BBC NEWS | Business | Bill Gates spots the next big thing

He said that from within Microsoft Office a user would be able to find the nearest Kinkos, order the print job, bill their account and have the documents delivered.

Unless the Kinko's is delivering significantly higher quality printing, I fail to see why this is a good thing. It actually seems to entail a good deal more expense and inconvenience than the desk printer model. This seems like technology in search of a solution.

This seems true of the Smart Mobs stuff I've seen so far, which mainly consists of pie-in-the-wireless-sky speculation about what all this could mean. Very different from the rest of the world, where they got the tech and just started using it. Here we must endure the endless handwringing and pontification (vide the Smart Mobs subhead "The next social revolution") as to what all this means, with enormous dollops of breathless hype. I'd still like to read the book, but I just might not be cut out for the emerging technologies world; perky futurism usually just raises my skeptical hackles and makes me wonder what you're selling.