“For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.”
Leonardo da Vinci.
Readers of this blog will notice how often I’m looking into the future of what OSS might look like into the future. Today I was pondering how evolved our current OSS actually are and what’s still ahead of us.
If we were to compare OSS with the embarrassingly rough picture I put together below showing the (R)evolution of manned flight, where do you think we currently sit?
We’ve probably gone past Leonardo Da Vinci’s theoretical ornithopter and the Montgolfier brothers’ relatively simple hot-air balloons. We have managed to get off the ground like the Wright Brothers and even gone intercontinental like Lindburgh’s Spirit of St Louis.
But I feel like we’re reaching an inflection point where so many influencing technologies are emerging that the OSS of today will barely resemble the OSS of tomorrow, just like the DC-4. These evolutions will help to remove some of the inefficiencies of today’s implementations and take OSS to a greater level of sophistication, but we’re still awaiting the revolutionary 747 that takes OSS to the masses in a reliable and consistent manner.
Where do you think we currently sit?