Hybrid (Premium)

In January 2008, my wife Stephanie and I visited Paris and stayed with friends in the Fontenay-sous-Bois suburb. They had recently purchased a Toyota Prius, and I recall stepping outside their apartment to walk down the street to the RER train station so we could head into the city. Then I stopped and regarded their new vehicle.

"You know, you're really sending a message here," I said. Yes, this was years after the infamous South Park episode "Smug," which is about the attitudes of those who purchased hybrid cars that early on. And perhaps not surprisingly, my friend was slightly taken aback by this declaration. But I didn't mean it critically. Instead, I was thinking more along the lines of having strong principles and then acting and not just talking. Walking the walk, if you will. Living by example.

That the worldwide vehicle infrastructure we have now is based entirely around a fuel source that is dangerous, (ironically) hard to transport, not renewable, and scarce is, in some ways, a matter of coincidence. That is, you may be surprised to discover that the first cars were, in fact, electric and not gasoline based. But whatever. Here we are, trying to crawl back from this horrible mistake while one of the world's most powerful industries lobbies to prevent that from happening. It is what it is.

Sometimes you know the answer to a problem. And sometimes you know you can't get there in one step. And so the solution is to take steps in the right direction, with an eye on the future. And that's what the auto industry did, or I should say, what Toyota did, when it kicked off the hybrid automobile sub-market with the first Prius in the late 1990s. At first, it was a curiosity. Then it was a sensation. And then it had lots of competition. Today, plug-in hybrids provide a thematic stepping stone between the gasoline world of the past and the electric world of the future.

Not that electric vehicles are the be-all, end-all; there are certainly sustainability and scarcity issues with batteries too. But don't miss the point here. Hybrids can help us move forward. What was once a curiosity is today not just accepted and commonplace but hardly worth talking about. They simply exist and are successful.

But I'm not here today to chat about cars, though that topic remains a minor passion of mine. Instead, I'd like to use the example of hybrid cars to frame how similar hybrid personal computing devices can help us likewise transition from less capable pasts to more versatile futures. And how, as with the automotive industry, these things often start out as curiosities. And it's interesting to see which succeed and move into a place of not just acceptance but success.

To frame this further, I am of course the original "right tool for the job" guy. That is, back in 2013, my experiences with hybrid computing devices---one device that tried to replace two or more devices---resulted in repeated failures. "One device that does everything is o...