How Developers Are Working to Cut Complexity in Tomorrow’s PCs
The PC is dead. Long live the PC.
No, the device that has penetrated half of U.S. households is not about to disappear. But paradoxically, the recent move by Pasadena-based Free-PC.com Inc. to give away 10,000 computers in exchange for the ability to hard-wire ads on their screens is another sign that the PC is losing its grip on the center of our computing experience.
To understand why, first take a look back. The PC took command of computing innovation when it wrested control away from the high priests of mainframes. The change was fantastically empowering in the era of inward computing: Each PC an island, each user self-governing. But as the industry gradually delivered the power of a mainframe to the desktop, users were saddled with the complexity formerly hidden by the high priests.
In the Web era, two new applications--e-mail and browsing--suddenly began to dominate. The focus of computing rapidly shifted, from solitary work as a captive of Microsoft Windows to the PC as a window to communication and shared public resources.
The change also brought computing full circle into a new period in which centralized organization of computing resources again makes sense. Most people today use computers in a way that no longer favors a multipurpose box with difficult and hopelessly unreliable software.
The response of the industry has been to entice new users with progressively cheaper--and finally, free--boxes. You can bet the big vendors view this trend with fear and loathing, and not just because of what it’s doing to their profit margins. It also reflects the value consumers place in a PC.
“Most of us would like to have a much simpler device on our desktops. It’s not whether the device is $500 or $400,” said Jeffrey Tarter, editor of the industry newsletter Soft-Letter. “It’s getting the complexity back into the hands of someone who can manage it.”
That process of distancing users from complexity is well underway as developers mediate more of our experience through a single, relatively simple application--the browser. Consider a few telltale signs:
* Portals, the mega-sites that most people use as a home base for the Web, have expanded into communications, financial planning and business management, taking over from traditional applications and services.
* A range of Web sites keep your appointments and contacts on a central server computer that you connect to via any browser-equipped computer at any time.
Visto Corp. (https://www.visto.com) in Mountain View, Calif., recently announced a free service that adds space to store your personal files on their server--a transitional phase toward “Web-top” computing, in which Web-based applications that are updated and supported centrally replace PC equivalents that require individual support by each user.
* Browser-based collaborative computing--joint editing of documents by people who are an office or a continent apart--has already been enabled by Santa Clara, Calif.-based ActiveTouch Inc. (https://www.activetouch.com).
* Corporations are beginning to rent large applications over the Web. Instead of hiring the staff to run a vastly expensive Oracle Corp. database off your own servers, for example, you will soon be able to hire Oracle to do it for you and access your data through any browser.
Even Apple Computer Inc., whose historic difference was a superior operating system, hardly pitches the Mac OS anymore. The iMac became a sensation because of its daring design and easy Internet access.
But even iMac users must have some grasp of megabytes, gigabytes, megahertz and cache. And though they have the time, many computer users loathe having to learn about specs.
The complexity in PCs has always made the term “consumer PC” an oxymoron, said Michael Hackworth, chief executive of Cirrus Logic Inc., a maker of microprocessors for specialized devices.
A genuine consumer product requires no knowledge or skill and little or no training, he said. “The controls are automatic. You buy it for what it does, not because of what’s under the hood.”
If Hackworth and scores of other companies are right, there will soon be a flood of genuine Internet consumer products on the market--from screen phones to hand-held computers to printers to cars--that interact with you and communicate with each other. Sun Microsystems Inc.’s recently introduced Jini technology is one promising scheme for tying them all together.
And Lakewood, Colo.-based Qubit Technology has announced one of the first genuine Web appliances that looks likely to threaten the PC. Its wireless, touch-screen Web tablet can be carried from the kitchen (it’s sealed to resist those spaghetti-sauce splashes) to the living room sofa or to the back yard for sharing a Web discovery with a family member.
The size of a thick magazine, the device offers browsing, e-mail, address book, calendar and simple word processing, all customized for a device that’s less than a real computer--or more, depending on your perspective.
Qubit won’t ship for a few months, and unlike those 10,000 PCs, it won’t be free for a while. But when such products get cheap enough (give it a year or so), millions of people may prefer simple, reliable specialists to bulky, error-prone generalists--even free ones.
Years ago, I worked at a computer magazine where a product was deemed poorly designed if we couldn’t figure out how to use it without consulting the manual. In the future, the poorly designed product will be the one that comes with a manual.
*
Times staff writer Charles Piller can be reached via e-mail at charles.piller@latimes.com.
