Ain’t the PC dead yet?

2000-06-30

There’s only a few drink cartons and strips of gaffer tape to indicate the presence of PC Expo, which came to a close at the end of last week. One of the debates it spawned was whether there was any future in the Personal Computer: the answer, was of course, as diverse as the IT market itself. Essentially there are two camps, the gadget freaks and the PC diehards: ho would ever have thought that PC companies would be the ones looking staid, next to the new generation of technology companies?

A major strand of activity at PC Expo was caused by companies such as Palm, Handspring and Sony, all touting there wares as the future of technology. Certainly there is a place for the device – there may be more PCs than there are handhelds, but the latter is about to merge with the mobile phone which has already overtaken the PC in worldwide sales. Given the rate of churn in the mobile phone market, in two years time there will e few phone users who do not have PDA application functionality on their phone.

At the same time, PC manufacturers were quick to explain how the market for PCs is going full steam ahead. Based on current statistics the prediction is for 1 billion PCs to have been sold by 2005. According to a study released last month, one of the drivers for PC sales is the PDA – users require a central repository for the data that is spread across multiple devices. Enter the PC, in its role as “the mainframe in the living room.” Trouble is, there are a couple of factors that the report appears to have missed.

The first of these is broadband technologies. Ralph Martino, VP of strategy and marketing for IBM’s personal systems group, was quoted on \link{http://www.news.com,News.com} as saying that broadband communications, in both the wired (xDSL) and wireless (UMTS) forms, would provide a backbone making the PC even more indispensable. Trouble is, broadband is also the enabler of a new technology model – that of the Application Service Provider or ASP.

Individuals and businesses with broadband Internet access be turning more and more to services available over the Web. The reason for this is simple cost-effectiveness: it will be cheaper to do so than to buy and install the applications. Broadband games users, for example, will not have to purchase a copy of a multi-user game before going head to head against their pals; rather, they will put in a credit card number and start to play. The end-node device need only be capable of receiving and displaying the graphics.

Maybe the debate is centring on the wrong topic. Many PCs wil be sold in the future, but they will be very different from the ones we use today. The self-contained units based on the Easy PC initiative, produced by companies such as Dell and HP, are an indication of what is to come. Further indication came at PC Expo, with IBM’s impressive demonstration of a watch-sized PC. The PC architecture may never die, and why should it? It may not be optimal, but it is a perfectly reasonable basis for computing. What is already on the slab, is the need for expensive, complex, noisy, error-prone combinations of hardware and software, either in the home or in the office. This model of computing has never worked, and the sooner we can get it in the ground, the better.

(First published 30 June 2000)