Is the PC Becoming Passe?
“The personal computer is a ridiculous device,” opined Larry Ellison, CEO of the giant database software company Oracle, at a recent computer conference in Paris.
Consumers bought 12 million of these ridiculous devices last year, and the figure for this year is expected to be even higher. But Ellison has a point--a self-serving point, but a point nonetheless.
Most home computer users don’t understand that the machine they bought and struggled to learn could run a medium-sized hotel or a small hospital. Personal computers have become so powerful that they are verging on the ridiculous, especially given the tasks most users ask them to perform.
Ellison and others are now promoting what they call “network-centric” computing, as opposed to individual, personal computing on a desktop. In some ways, it’s a throwback to the pre-PC model of computing, in which “dumb” terminals depended on large, centralized mainframes for storage and processing power.
But the mainframe of today is the ever-expanding, ever more versatile Internet.
Already, access to the Internet is the reason that many people with little interest in number crunching or database management are buying personal computers. But the growing power of the Internet, along with the rise of the easy-to-use graphical portion known as the World Wide Web, actually decreases the need for users to have a powerful PC that can do everything and anything.
*
Instead, consumers might soon buy cheaper, simpler devices designed to optimize access to the Net. Ben Schneiderman, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, has proposed a product he calls a “webtop”--a small box about the size of a magazine, with nothing but a color screen and a pointing device but with a high-speed, perhaps wireless, connection to the Internet. To enter text, the user could call up a “virtual keyboard” on the screen, Schneiderman says. He thinks a webtop could sell for between $100 and $300.
This is not just theory. Earlier this week, Sun Microsystems executives held a news conference to announce their intention to develop cheap network access devices that can use Sun’s new network programming language, Java. Java allows users to download programs from the Internet that perform specific functions and then disappear from the user’s computer. Sun CEO Scott McNealy said there has been more interest in Java than in any Sun product in the company’s 13-year history--without any advertising.
McNealy agrees that a future networking device could be sold for a few hundred dollars. And Sun isn’t the only company looking in this direction. Researchers at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto have developed a hand-held, palm-sized device called PARCTab, which accesses the Net through infrared connections.
*
What could make a decisive difference in the coming tug of war between desktop computing and network-centric computing is the speed of the Internet in the future. In the September issue of Scientific American, Vincent Chan of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory describes the potential speed of an all-optical network: 100 gigabits per second, more than 2,000 times faster than what today’s fastest networks can manage.
As Chan notes, such speed will open up immense possibilities. He speculates on the potential for a home videographer to plug his camera into a network connection in the wall and broadcast directly to relatives across the country, in real time. And with high-speed connections to the Net, users of a webtop could “rent” software on remote machines, use the processing power of fast computers, lease storage space and get near-instantaneous access to data anywhere in the world.
Even the company that has the most to lose from the PC-centric computing model of today--Microsoft Corp.--appears to be alert to the new possibilities. It is Microsoft that has nurtured and profited immensely from the feedback loop between PC power and software, in which memory-hogging, feature-laden software requires more and more powerful machines and bigger hard disks, which in turn encourages more memory-hogging software.
Yet Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his former partner, Paul Allen, admit in the October issue of Fortune magazine that the Internet could change everything.
“The Internet is the seed corn of a lot of things that are going to happen, and there are so many parallels to when Paul and I were involved in the beginnings of the PC,” says Gates. “We said back then, ‘Don’t DEC and IBM know they’re in deep trouble?’ Here we are, staring at the same kind of situation.”
Even if network-centric computing takes off, desktop computers aren’t going to disappear. They’ll still be useful for developing content for the Net, and they are increasingly used as network servers, even by so-called kitchen-table entrepreneurs. But if the new model gains prominence, PC manufacturers will have to switch to producing high-volume, low-margin consumer devices for accessing the Net, things that will look more like a telephone, an Etch-a-Sketch or a pager than the PCs of today.
The biggest obstacle to this transition may be psychological: Many people simply like to keep their data and do their work on their own machines, and they might be reluctant to trust a network connection or the reliability of someone else’s computer. This is a subjective question at this point, but the answer could determine the fate of companies and fortunes in the near future.
*
Gary Chapman is coordinator of the 21st Century Project at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached via e-mail at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
