For PC Consumers, the Peripherals Are the Objects of Desire
Right after noshing their takeout Chinese food and sipping California Cabernet, everyone at the Giant Software Co.’s little dinner party gathered around--what else?--the computer for a little entertainment.
No “Myst” or “Microsoft Flight Simulator” for this software-savvy crowd, however. Instead, these folks wanted to play interactive rock star. The aspiring Eric Claptons, Eddie Vedders and Joan Jetts took turns grabbing an electric guitar that was plugged right into the PC. The package let them jam along with a music video CD-ROM. The system could easily be calibrated to accommodate everyone from fumbling novices who could barely strum to hotshots who thought they were Hendrix reincarnate.
Most of the fun, of course, came from watching the people perform rather than listening to what they played. As tipsy party-goers and computational connoisseurs, this software crowd enjoyed their licks.
It really wasn’t the CD-ROM software that was so intriguing; it was the way people clutched and stroked the guitar as they duckwalked across the floor or flamboyantly dropped to their knees a la Jimi at Monterey Pop. (Not to worry--this wasn’t a guitar-smashing kind of crowd.) In fact, no matter how cleverly designed the software was, the system wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling without the guitar. The software alone wasn’t enough.
Increasingly, the real value of a computer system rests in the peripherals as much as in the software or the computer itself. Indeed, the most important breakthroughs in consumer computing are more likely to come from innovations in the peripherals that link to computers than from any dramatic improvement in software.
You doubt that? Consider the recent explosion in CD-ROM. The installed base of CD-ROM drives worldwide nearly doubled last year, to more than 20 million units from 10.6 million in 1993. Compaq, now the largest seller of personal computers, builds in a CD-ROM drive with practically every home computer it ships.
That begs some important questions: To what extent are people now buying home computers precisely because of their CD-ROM capabilities? To what extent has this peripheral become a driver of content design in the software community?
Similarly, just two years ago, only a quarter of personal computers had modems. Today more than half do, and everyone talks about “surfing the Internet” and logging on to America Online, Prodigy or CompuServe to play games and virtually chat. Practically no one buys a new PC or upgrades an old one without getting a modem. Of course, if you have only a wimpy 2,400-baud modem instead of a 14.4 speedster, don’t even think of trying to get on the Internet’s World Wide Web to explore other people’s multimedia home pages. Your participation in the global on-line community is often defined by the baud rate of your peripheral.
Is it an overstatement to assert that the peripherals--not the software or the processors--really determine the value of the computer in the mind’s marketplace? Of course you need high-powered processors. Of course software is essential. But maybe we’ve gotten our value equations confused. More often than not, it seems the peripherals create the new contexts for software innovation rather than the other way around. After all, what’s a video game without a joystick and blaster buttons? What’s a graphic-user interface without a toggle switch, track ball or mouse?
An excellent case could be made that the success of Apple’s Macintosh was due less to its nifty packaging and snappy graphic-user interface than to the availability of Apple’s low-cost laser printer. It was the LaserWriter as much as the Macintosh that launched the multibillion-dollar industry in desktop publishing. To be sure, companies like Aldus and Adobe were essential to developing the layout and typographic software that made desktop publishing accessible to the masses, but without the appropriate peripheral at the right price, what would have been the point?
In the future, the most interesting--and important--opportunities for innovation won’t lie in coming up with cleverer kinds of software, but in creating new kinds of peripherals that reframe our popular conceptions of computing. Some of these peripherals may be input devices like scanners or output devices like printers or interface devices like toggle switches or virtual-reality gloves.
It would be fun, for example, if you could play “Microsoft Golf” by swinging a special golf club instead of tapping a mouse. It might be amusing to have a faithful replica of an F-16 joystick in hand for piloting a virtual jet fighter, rather than just an ordinary plastic joystick. It might be more productive to have a low-cost scanner that can easily read newspaper and magazine clippings into the computer than to have to type them in.
No doubt the software jocks will figure out ways to make these peripherals even more valuable to their users. But the essential point remains: It will be the objects we attach to computers--more than the software that runs them--that offer the greatest opportunity to create new markets in popular computing.
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Michael Schrage is a writer, consultant and research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He writes this column independently for The Times. He can be reached at schrage@latimes.com by electronic mail via the Internet.
