Goodbye PC

Within a decade, most peo­ple will not have a PC.

Some peo­ple have argued that its death was fore­told by the intro­duc­tion of the iPhone a the iPad but I would say that those were only com­po­nents in a trend that has been going for a lot longer.

What is ubiq­ui­tous computing?

In the late eight­ies, researchers at the famed Xerox PARC research started think­ing about the impli­ca­tion of the com­puter dis­ap­pear­ing. In their views, infor­ma­tion from com­put­ers would start meld­ing into the sur­round­ings with­out being thought of as part of a com­puter. In that sense, they saw the world we now live in 20 years ago.

Think of how you’re read­ing this. It may be on a com­puter, a tablet (like the iPad), a e-reader (yes, TNL.net is now on the Kin­dle), a mobile device (black­berry, android, or iPhone), or a TV. Each of those items pro­vides a screen that can be con­nected today to access infor­ma­tion from the Internet.

The increased num­bers of sen­sors in our world is only fur­ther­ing this trend. For exam­ple, at their most basic level, you have bar­code on sup­plies in the gro­cery store. Every time these bar codes get scanned, their pres­ence is trans­lated into bites on a machine some­where, to be tab­u­lated and pre­sented. You don’t gen­er­ally think of the cash reg­is­ter at your local super­mar­ket as a com­puter but it is one.

Your tele­phone (either wired or wire­less) also pro­vides tremen­dous amounts of data about you and what you’re doing. For exam­ple, your phone com­pany prob­a­bly has as good an under­stand­ing of your social graph as face­book does since it tracks who you call, how often, and for how long.

In New York, as in a lot of Euro­pean cities, sub­way trains now have sen­sors allow­ing any­one to see where trains are, and get some esti­mate as to when they’re com­ing. Once again, bits of infor­ma­tion pre­sented in a com­puted form on a screen like this (Hat Tip to Sec­ond Avenue Saga):

Source: Sec­ond Avenue Saga

So infor­ma­tion now sur­rounds us in a num­ber of ways. This means that the com­puter, as an infor­ma­tion device, will lose its preva­lence since there are now other ways in which we can access the information.

But how will we inter­act with it?

Bye Bye Key­board, Bye Bye Mouse

Peo­ple in the mobile camp will argue that touch is the way to inter­act with infor­ma­tion. The answer is cor­rect but only par­tially so. While touch is the most effi­cient way to inter­act with a screen you hold (as proven by the iPad, iPhone, and now most smart­phones), it is not so good when it comes to screens you are not hold­ing. Steve Jobs, in the intro­duc­tion of the new Mac­book Air, said so himself.

So what is the rest of the world to do in order to inter­act with those other screens. Some solu­tions, like the new Android TV, look to inter­act­ing with those with new remotes that look like key­boards. They want to bring more of the com­puter to those other screens. For exam­ple, Google TV devices offer a wide range of keyb0ard-like remotes.

This is the wrong answer because the major­ity of con­sumers are not inter­ested in that form fac­tor (I am talk­ing from expe­ri­ence here as I have a com­puter con­nected to my tele­vi­sion with a Log­itech DiNovo Mini key­board and it has failed every sin­gle per­son who has come in. I’m the only one who can really get a show started on there.)

How­ever, the right answer comes from a player every­one has all but dis­missed: Microsoft.

A resur­gent player

It’s been a rough decade for Microsoft. Badly singed by an Antitrust law­suit, the com­pany has become hes­i­tant and ten­ta­tive in its approach to the new post-PC world. It has also been sad­dled with a tough anchor: Win­dows. The prob­lem Microsoft has is that it con­tin­ues to hang on to the belief that every­thing needs to tie up to that platform.

And in doing so, it fails at most of its new efforts.

But there is one divi­sion at Microsoft that has some­how man­aged to avoid that curse: the gam­ing divi­sion. The Xbox has been a suc­cess because it hasn’t been sad­dled with the Win­dows back­ground. The group threw out that man­tle early on and devel­oped a series of machines that were per­form­ing well in the envi­ron­ment they were designed for: the liv­ing room.

And now, they’ve intro­duced Kinect, a device that I would call as rev­o­lu­tion­ary as the iPhone was in the mobile market.

Source: Wikipedia

The rev­o­lu­tion comes from the fact that the device intro­duces a new way to inter­act with a com­puter: with­out any phys­i­cal devices. Their tagline (“You are the con­troller”) rep­re­sents a brand new approach in defin­ing inter­faces for devices: whether it is voice or motion, the user is now brought closer inside the computer.

Extent the kinect to the next gen­er­a­tion of screen and you now have non-portable com­put­ing devices you will inter­act with­out hav­ing to touch them. Wave your hand in the air and you can manip­u­late objects in those devices.

The end of the drive

This week, Ver­i­zon showed off their  tech­ni­cal prowess by show­cas­ing how they could move files at a 10Gbps. To give you a sense of how fast that is, most com­put­ers today only oper­ate at 100Mbps so what Ver­i­zon accom­plished is roughly 100 times faster than the fastest net­work most peo­ple have expe­ri­enced. The most advanced com­put­ers avail­able on the mar­ket tend to top out at 1Gbps: they usu­ally can move files at those speeds on local net­work but it’s rare to find net­works that are con­nected to the inter­net at these types of speed. So what Ver­i­zon demon­strated is the future, a future where a 2 giga­byte file can be trans­fered in less than 5 seconds.

A few weeks ago, I told TNL.net read­ers that we were wit­ness­ing the begin­ning of the end for local stor­age. How­ever, since then, I’ve come back a bit on that idea: local stor­age will con­tinue to exist but mostly for caching pur­pose. In a world where you can move sev­eral gigs in a few sec­onds, it is more effi­cient to move data to the cloud, where it can be accessed from any device.

The rise of Work Computers

Based on all these trends, there is a more lim­ited need for PCs. While the Per­sonal com­puter was a great tran­si­tional device to the ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing world, it is a device which suf­fers from some limitations.

For starters, there are the input meth­ods. There is a clear rea­son why Apple didn’t make their devices any smaller than 11 inches and touted the fact that the Air­book had a full size key­board: our hands don’t get any smaller.  So the key­board and mouse, as entry device are gated by this fact and will be stuck in that mode for as long as we live.

But most peo­ple will not need a key­board or mouse in the future. Except where text is con­cerned, the exist­ing com­puter is get­ting close to hav­ing run its course: writ­ers will keep using them (until the point where voice dic­ta­tion soft­ware is good enough to replace the need for a key­board) and pro­gram­mers will con­tinue to use a key­board as an input device to pro­gram. Most every other peo­ple will inter­act with the devices either via direct touch (like the iPad) or via motion (like the Kinect).

Those uses will be pri­mar­ily for “work” or pro-sumer type of pur­pose and other peo­ple will not have com­put­ers at home.

One gat­ing fac­tor: Power

The main chal­lenge for most devices will, how­ever, con­tinue to be how to power them. To date, there has been some improve­ments in the bat­tery space but those are not mov­ing as fast as the rest of the tech­nol­ogy world.

And we’re becom­ing more demand­ing of our devices.

For exam­ple, most smart­phone users com­plain that their device lasts only a day or so on a full charge. But think of a decade ago. Back then, a device with a 1 Ghz process, 10–20 Gb of disk space, and about 128 Mb of RAM might have worked on a bat­tery charge for about 2 hours. Those were pow­er­ful lap­top back then but we didn’t seem to expect them to run all day.

Today, there is a lot of work going on around try­ing to get more out of the bat­ter­ies we have and com­pa­nies like Apple have worked on reduc­ing the amount of power a device may ask from a bat­tery: for exam­ple, the Mac­book Air is a mar­vel in try­ing to fig­ure out what to remove in order to ensure the devices squeezes more out of the battery.

Will the work com­puter disappear?

The last bas­tion of the com­puter will be the office. At this time, it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine peo­ple ges­tur­ing in front of their com­put­ers as a way to inter­act with them. More likely, tilted touch dis­plays will become the new norm in offices (and by tilted, I mean that the screen would be on the desk at an angle of no more than 20–25 degrees). Those types of changes will take some time to make their ways into cubi­cles and may force busi­ness to even rethink the con­cept of the cubi­cle. The ones that have already will get a head start on their competitor.