Vol 15, Issue 1

January 2, 2001

The Future of Computing Platforms

By Michael Slater

It is easy to hate the PC: many things are wrong with it. Architecturally, PC hardware design has reached an entirely acceptable level. Much of the legacy hardware (such as the ISA bus) has been purged from the current generation of systems, and 1394 and USB ports eliminate most of the drawbacks of the ancient serial and parallel ports. The PC's biggest hardware drawback today is one that the industry should be able to fix—if it can break the inertia: the predominance of ugly, bulky, noisy systems.

When we get to software, there's a lot more to hate about the PC. Twenty years of incremental evolution have left us with a system that is far more complex and unreliable than it should be. Windows 2000 improves reliability significantly, and in time this technology will trickle down to the consumer market, but the complexity remains. And in PC application software, featuritis has run rampant, while quality design that has the real needs of users in mind remains rare.

And then there's the business element: Microsoft and Intel earn a great deal of the profit made in the PC business, and their dominance can't help but generate a lot of resentment.

As the Web rose to prominence and computing power became cheap enough to distribute into less-expensive devices, the multitude of reasons to hate the PC fueled enthusiasm for a new wave of application-specific appliance-like devices. As I discussed in my September column, the idea of Web appliances, whether counter-top boxes or mobile tablets, is very appealing, but these devices have largely failed in the market so far. The reasons range from the high cost of displays and the challenges of supporting plug-ins to the difficulty of finding early adopters for products essentially aimed at laggard markets (e.g., the Web appliance for the masses).

This model has also run into trouble with the idea of a Web browser as a do-all environment. Thirty years ago, computing was done mostly on large shared computers: mainframes. Then PCs came on the scene, and by the time they had been around 10 years or so, nearly all applications had been moved off the mainframe and onto the PC. A few years later, with the spectacular rise of the Web, the pendulum—at least in terms of the design point for future products—had swung too far in the other direction. In the future, many thought, applications would run on the Web, data would be stored on the Web, and all we'd need on the PC would be a browser running Java. No more administration of local systems, no more overly complex PC software, no more local state.

This was a nice theory, and its appeal was strong in light of all the good reasons to hate the PC and the PC business. But it won't succeed as a mainstream replacement for consumer computing for one simple reason: it unnecessarily compromises the user experience.

To fit into the "everything is on the Web" model, users must give up too much. The PC model has lots of drawbacks, but it also has a lot going for it, not the least of which is an installed base that now covers essentially every business desk and around 60% of homes in the U.S. In theory, starting over with Java-based programs would free us all from the PC standard and stimulate a new wave of innovation. In reality, however, Java programs tend to be annoyingly slow, and the sheer effort of recreating the essential base of applications would be massive. For a software developer, it is hard to argue against building your program to make the most of the hardware—the vast majority of potential customers already have—and that, for better or worse, is the Windows PC.

At PhotoTablet, the company I started last spring, we have spent a lot of time talking with non-technical consumers, listening to their needs, desires and attitudes. The degree to which they accept their PCs, despite their frustrations, is surprising. Consumers have come to accept PCs as a fact of life; they have invested time and money in them, and it will take a very compelling proposition to convince them to switch to another approach. And the 40% of households without PCs are not the place to build a market; many of these households are saving for a PC and would see accepting anything else as a failure. The rest are too technology resistant for any new product to have much of a chance.

Like it or not, we're stuck with the PC as the platform that will dominate computing for the foreseeable future. The opportunity for appliances is not to replace the PC but to complement it. Web tablets and other appliances will be sold, for the most part, not to people buying them as alternatives to a PC but to people who want an additional Web-access device. Handheld computers, one of today's most successful classes of information appliance, don't replace a PC; they provide another way to interact with information that is stored primarily on the PC.

If the PC is eventually displaced, it will be because the myriad devices that will surround and complement it will gradually become more powerful and more independent, and then slowly make it less important. A frontal attack is impossible, however; appliances must start by complementing the PC, not by replacing it. And no matter what happens, there will always be a strong role for a multifunction, general-purpose computer.

Because the PC will be with us for a long time to come, we must do everything we can to improve it. A lot is in Microsoft's hands: we need an operating system that is more reliable and less complex. But application developers play an important role too: they must focus less on feature wars and more on meeting user needs in the simplest possible way. Applications must be built with the end-user in mind—not just as a way to deliver a technology.

Wonderful as it is, the Web has brought new challenges. With all the attention focused on the Internet, fewer resources are going into PC applications. (When was the last time you saw an exciting new application?) Consumers' time and attention are consumed by the Web, reducing their ability to absorb new applications. This shift, combined with an inefficient retail channel that has pushed price points to unprofitable levels, has gutted the consumer software business. Ironically, the PC industry has managed to get impressive hardware into the homes of the majority of U.S. consumers—but few companies are focusing on creating new software to deliver on the potential of those systems. What a shame!

Creating great consumer software is a tough challenge. It requires deep understanding of the consumers being served—all too rare among the software developers who tend to define programs as they build them. Once there is competition within a segment, product managers tend to focus on feature wars; a longer feature list is the easiest way to market a product. Unfortunately, more features are often not what consumers really need; they need the right features, better implemented. And even if the software developer achieves all this, it must somehow get the attention of consumers, convince them that its product is the right one, and find a way to profitably sell it.

Games are the only recent "killer applications"—in more ways than one—beyond email and the browser. Games appeal to only a minority of the population, however. The central challenge in creating new application categories is that people don't readily add new activities to their lives; they don't have the time. Photography is one mainstream consumer activity that is poised to move into the computer realm, thanks to the spectacular success of digital cameras. Hobbyists have made the switch, but ordinary consumers need better software. It is hard, however, to find other mainstream activities that are ripe for moving onto the PC and aren't already there.

Today's successful software provides the computer version of most common activities: writing, managing finances, getting news and product information, and shopping. Creating breakthrough applications in these areas is surely possible, but it is a daunting business challenge to go up against Microsoft or Intuit in the areas they dominate.

Significant near-term opportunities lie in finding new ways to benefit from directly connecting to applications on the Internet, rather than by using a browser, and in creating applications that bridge the PC to the emerging world of mobile devices. In the long run, applications that achieve the Grail of natural language interfaces, and that are intelligent assistants instead of ignorant slaves, may be the most important, but no one yet seems to know how to create them.