Small devices do few things, but well
USA TODAY - Thursday, March 19, 1998
Take the Internet with you in a phone, watch or shoe
The PC is dying.
It might not seem that way at the moment. Personal computers have
become almost a necessity of office life. They've even landed in more
than 40% of homes. But the powerful, expensive, do-anything computing
box that's generically called a PC is going to be overrun by a swarm of
small, inexpensive, focused computing devices that have more in common
with consumer electronics, such as Nintendo machines and pagers.
The PC's time is ticking away as of now. "This is the PC's golden age,"
says Tom Rhinelander, analyst at Forrester Research. About 2002, he
says, "You'll write the obituary."
Recent surprise weakness in demand for PCs - which knocked more
than 10 points off Intel stock March 5 and hurt Microsoft, Compaq and
others - might be an early sign that the PC locomotive is beginning to lose
steam.
Others say that's too harsh. "There's too much at stake with the Intels
and Compaqs," says David Dorman, CEO of PointCast. PCs will stay an
important product for a long time, especially in the office. The big PC
companies will help make sure of that, he says.
Still, many in technology say that while today the PC is computing for
most people, its relative importance will quickly diminish as computing
spreads into 3Com PalmPilots, TV set-top boxes, screen phones, cars
and even shoes.
"We're planning on it," says John Sidgmore, vice chairman of
telecommunications giant WorldCom. "People will carry around several
different devices. Maybe a watch or cellular phone or PDA (personal
digital assistant) - all enormously more powerful than they are today; all
communicating in ways we've never seen before."
The Internet makes this kind of everywhere-computing possible.
Information doesn't have to be stored on a big hard drive or CD-ROM. It
can be on the Net. The power of a Pentium MMX PC might be needed
to see rich graphics or multimedia, but a $100 home phone with a small
monochrome screen could grab phone listings or movie timetables off the
Net. Cell phones with little screens could call up e-mail. A stove with a
screen, computer chip and network connection could download recipes
and cooking help guides.
In fact, the Internet, which is almost solely a computer-to-computer
medium today, will be transformed as it attaches to these devices and
delivers different forms of information based on the Internet Protocol
(IP) language. Call it the multinet.
"The Internet will become a utility like water or electricity," says Kim
Polese, CEO of Marimba. "You'll just plug something into it anywhere.
We won't focus on the technology. That will sound silly - like if you went
to plug in a blender and said, 'I'm going to use some electricity!' "
The utility of such a multinet will make focused computing devices more
useful and more popular and further erode the importance of PCs. "The
PC was merely the first universal digital appliance and the first device of
its kind to be attached to networks," Jason Pontin, editor of The Red
Herring, wrote recently. "Nearly everything is in place to begin wiring
the ordinary objects of living."
Predictions of computing devices that steal the PC's thunder have been
around for a long time. What's new is that the future is arriving.
This time, it's real
The breakthrough is the PalmPilot. It's a $300 computer that fits in a shirt
pocket and works using a touch screen and handwriting recognition. It
can keep a calendar and phone lists, handle e-mail and play games like
chess. It's the first true hit of the device age. More than 1 million have
been sold.
Other non-PC computing devices have made headway. WebTV, which
uses a $300 box to pull in the Internet on a TV set, is slowly gaining a
foothold in homes. In the corporate market, IBM, Oracle and Sun
Microsystems are pushing network computers, or NCs - cheap,
slimmed-down computers used to get data and programs off a network.
Motorola is marketing a pager called PageWriter 2000 that looks like a
tiny laptop computer and can send and receive e-mail.
In recent weeks, there's been a splash of activity. At the Internet World
conference last week, Hewlett-Packard CEO Lew Platt unveiled a new
strategy he calls Electronic World. It's a post-PC, multinet plan to create
new consumer devices and link them.
On other fronts, Intel and Mattel earlier this year announced a
partnership to create "PC-enhanced toys." Says Mattel's chief of
strategy, Doug Glen: "Smart playthings are the future of the toy industry."
In cellular phones, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola all are beginning to sell
handsets that have enough computing power to pull in e-mail and travel
information. Daimler-Benz and Microsoft each have plans to build
computers into car dashboards and use wireless networks to link the
devices to the Internet. In a major development, Tele-Communications
Inc. and other cable companies are beginning to replace old cable TV
set-top boxes with digital models packed with computing power and
software from Microsoft and Sun. The boxes will be able to tap the
Internet and could invade millions of homes.
This trend is not just about the consumer market. At Lotus
Development's annual conference in January, a hot topic was how Lotus
Notes and other software can be part of a world where devices reign
and networks connect them, says Mike Zisman, Lotus executive vice
president. "We're reaching a point where there's a different model out
there," he says. "We'll be connected all the time, and not just through big
PCs on the desk but through the things you carry with you."
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Greenberg sees an opportunity. He
launched a company, Scient, specifically to help businesses leap into what
he calls any-to-any computing.
"What you'll see in the next five years will be mind-blowing," he says.
"We don't fully understand the extent of it yet."
There's a reason focused devices should take off. While a PC can do
many things fairly well, a device can usually do one thing extremely well
and much more simply. Think of video games. A Nintendo or Sega game
has much better graphics than a PC, takes almost no time to boot up and
requires only a few buttons to operate. By comparison, similar games on
a PC are a pain.
Faxes are another example. Sending one out of a PC is complicated.
Sending one using a fax machine is simple. Most people prefer to use the
focused device - the fax machine - to send and receive faxes.
Wallet and shoes
Beyond the tangible products and real moves companies are making,
there's a fuzzier future that could be even more device-happy.
In IBM's labs, researchers are working on a digital wallet that would hold
financial information, electronic credit cards and driver's license and
digitized photos of your kids. Labs at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology have tried embedding computers in clothing and shoes.
Eventually, futurists say, almost everything will have a computer chip and
network connection, from dishwashers to electric guitars. To allow
everything to work together, homebuilders such as John Laing Homes
are starting to prewire houses with computer connections, much in the
way homes are wired for electricity.
Where does this shift leave the PC? Probably in two places, experts say.
One will be on the desk at work. That's a place where you need a
machine that can do a lot of different things, store information and have
the power to search databases or display 3-D engineering drawings. The
other place might be in the home, running a local area network that
connects all the devices there and stores the family's digital files.
But even those uses might become threatened. Network computers or
some derivative could dislodge many office PCs. And as residential areas
get wired with fast, high-bandwidth Internet connections, such as cable
modems, a central computer to run a home network might become no
more necessary than having a home power generator to get electricity.
The implications for the PC industry are huge. If the meat of the
computing market shifts to devices, PC companies will have to decide to
either shift that way or stick to PCs and focus on specific corporate
markets. Those that shift to devices might not have an easy time.
"That's not a skill they have," says Forrester's Rhinelander. "American
companies have dominated PCs. But now we're talking about products
that are more like game consoles, phones and TVs."
Who's good at those kinds of products? Consumer giants such as Sony,
Sharp and Nintendo, cell phone makers Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia
and probably companies that don't exist today. All could be the PC
industry's new challengers.
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