Fundamental Mobility
I came across this article while looking over tech news: http://special.msn.com/msnbc/technologywireless.armx?GT1=7204
I find it just re-iterates what people have always had a trend for: technological replacement in a parallel fashion. The opposite of this is replacement in a direct fashion, such as replacing casette with CDs, VHS with DVDs, Desktops with laptops, fossil fuel with hydrogen, where the replacement is clear, obvious, and most importantly, intended. While the latter strategy works in most cases, there are just many instances where people hesitate to “upgrade.” For example, tablets haven’t replaced laptops, computers haven’t yet replaced books, and PDAs haven’t replaced anything.
I think it comes down to core usefulness. People can smell gadgetry. When you try to sell things like PDAs at hundreds of dollars, people expect a fundamental improvement in the way they perform some fundamental task, which the PDA can’t offer for most of the world’s common people. On the other hand, people flock to technology that touches the fundamental aspects of our lives. These are the billion dollar products, like the mp3 player, the car, and heck, even bottled water. (Yes, bottled water is an invention, though now a commodity.)
Enter the cell phone. It’s not a gadget (though some companies would like to stuff them with gadgetry), and it really provides a change in the way we conduct our daily lives, because of the way it has bridged what was a gap in social connectivity. With connectivity, we have information. With information, we have knowledge. Of course, this is sounding awfully familiar to the same basic service a computer provides. When two fundamental tools, in this case cell phones and computers, start finding areas of commonality, we begin to see what I refer to as technological replacement in a parallel fashion.
Replacement in a parallel fashion happens slowly and steadily, but surely. It is how word processing, a software innovation, replaced the typewriter, a hardware innovation. It is how the internet has replaced libraries. It is how cell phones have basically replaced wristwatches (actually, more like displaced wristwatches to a true accessory). And in the future, it will be how cellphones will replace mobile computing.
Because the two functionalities are so similiar, my prediction is that we will start to see the conquering of the PDA first. Slowly, “smartphones”, with software headed by Microsoft, will begin to meld with what we know today as the PDA. Then, as the smartphone gets beefier in function and as the laptop begins to get smaller/thinner in size, I think we’ll start to see the merging of voice and computing into a single, consolidated solution for humankind.
Will it replace the desktop? It’s hard to say. Deep down, I just don’t see the desktop as a fundamental paradigm that is inherent to humankind. It’s just not natural the way we sit down in front of a monitor and consume/produce information via a keyboard. Humans were meant to be mobile, and I think that’s where computing ought to be headed.