Will The PC Die?

Technology gurus say that the PC as we knew it, is dead. But, are there any information appliances, which can claim to take the place of the PC? 

Many people have been fantasizing about specialized and easy to use devices like a car that will have its computer sending a command to your microwave oven at home as soon as you reach within a 100-yards of your driveway. Fridges that will order milk or eggs when the stock gets low and so on. These gadgets are supposed to eliminate the complexity of life and make it simpler for us. These fantasies were based on the dreams of the dotcom boom. The situation is changing now and many assumptions made by these dreamers may no longer hold good.

While information appliances will proliferate, they will not be very cheap to own and operate. If you need a car computer to calculate the distance you are away from your house and then issue a command to the microwave oven, don't expect these services to be free. In fact, many 'free' services of the dotcom era are coming to an end and more will follow the trend. 

Also, these appliances will not be as simple and easy to operate as they have been projected to be. Our frustrations with today's PCs may end with the so-called death of the PC, but they will give way to new frustrations of the newer appliances.

From the frying pan to the fire

The problem with information appliances is that while they are presented as products for a mature market, the market is never as mature as the developers of these products think it is. 

When technology changes rapidly, greater ease of use serves to attract more users and developers, creating new frustrations. Learning to use a handheld device can be frustrating to a user who is not familiar with the technology and he might not be able to harness even 10 percent of its capabilities. 

It is necessary to recognize that flexibility and ease of use are always in conflict, and the importance of these two differs among users. The learning curve is also different for every user.

An easy to use product with embedded software may be most attractive for one user. The same product may not be so attractive to another user who needs some flexibility to make the product suitable for his requirements. 

Hidden mystery

Embedded systems make technology invisible to you, so that you just use the product without having to bother about how the technology inside works. I will be happy to get an appliance that takes care of my financial accounting - where all I have to do is just enter the data and the appliance takes care of everything else. Such an appliance is most likely to have a serious problem for me. 

Being a product with hard coded embedded software inside its ROM - it may probably recognize just one currency, the US dollar! Any reports or documents generated by such an appliance are useless for me, unless I can reconfigure this appliance to recognize the rupee as the currency. That is where the flexibility comes in. 

Easy and friendly is the way to be

Information appliances will be popular, if they provide many new services that the PC is not capable of, and will do so in user-friendly ways. Having to join an evening class on how to use a new cell phone will be as frustrating for a busy executive as it can be with the PC. 

The information appliance market will take a long time to mature. Further, with proliferation of the information appliances, there will be a need to synchronize the data within various appliances. The PC, rather than being dead, may play a key role in this area. It may probably acquire a prominent position again, with a different role to play!

When a product brings down the complexity of doing things below some magic threshold it draws millions of people to that application. That is what happened with the PC in the eighties and again with the Internet in the nineties. 

The same thing may happen again with a future information appliance if it meets these requirements. I can drive a car without knowing how its engine works. The engine is invisible to me as long as it works smoothly. So is the case with the information appliances -- if the technology is invisible to me and the product works for me with ease -- I am happy with the product. If it takes too much of effort configuring the product or learning to use it, I will be frustrated.

The next link

Information appliances are the natural steps in the evolution of information processing. Digital computers were very expensive and accessible only to a few. Then came the PC that individuals could own. 

As even the PC was somewhat expensive, it was essential to have as much functionality in the PC as possible. That is why the PC is designed to run so many different applications, and needs so much of configuration to run these applications properly without crashing each other. 

New technologies are making small and inexpensive devices possible, which can provide individuals with the functionality they need. Different appliances may provide different functions of today's PC tomorrow, each one with a dedicated embedded function. What some may see as the death of the PC may in fact be the reincarnations of the PC in different new forms.

We keep talking about the PCs and information appliances so much because companies like Intel keep reminding us every day about the "Intel inside" microprocessor! The microprocessor inside the PC and the software it runs is still very much visible to us. Compare this with the invisible microprocessors in so many other appliances like cell phones, microwave ovens, self-focusing cameras, and the like. 

The latest game consoles have more processing power than the supercomputers of the eighties. When the information appliances of tomorrow hide their technology to such a level, will they become appliances in the real sense? A handheld appliance with embedded speech recognition software and speech to text processor may be all that I will need tomorrow to write this article. But will it help me if I have a cold that distorts my voice a bit? That remains to be seen.

Ashok Dongre is an advertising and marketing professional, specializing in Internet/Intranet strategies and website design.