I find it hard to believe that the pc is changing from a computational device to a communications vehicle. I believe there will always be the need for a computational pc in the home, and certainly in the office.
It's a question of emphasis. CPU, disk, and memory have become almost free. Walk into any computer store, buy the cheapest machine you can, and you'll walk out with a box that handily beats the high-end machines of just a couple of years ago. More to the point, applications have not kept pace: there just isn't a mass-market, must-have, killer app that needs those 24 GB of disk, 256 MB of RAM, and that 500 MHz CPU.
But bandwidth: that we need. Build me an Internet that can pump, say, 3 Mb/s from any desktop to any other desktop in the world, at an end-user price point (<$100/month), and the killer apps will follow. But for now, the CPU, disk, and RAM battles are largely won. Until bandwidth catches up, it's hard to imagine getting much "lift" out of improving them by another factor of 2. |
