Is The Pc Dead

Everyone says the PC is going the way of the dinosaur, but consider this-- I have ten clocks in my home--each set to a different time. I have three or four "electronic address books"-- each with only partial lists.

Small devices are fine, but you need something to coordinate all those devices ( an example: Nova has a program on XP, you are at a meeting which is going to go very long, wouldn't it be good to log in to your VCR and record those sessions ).

What will that be? A PC.

PC's still have uses, and if Microsoft is not a power anymore, new blood may come in and create new applications which will install even newer blood into PCs.

ThaddeusOlczyk

When I read the above, I thought "Nova! That's the TV program I was trying to think of recently." (I really liked the show, but haven't watched in awhile.) Then I went to my TV(*), clicked the Tivo button on my remote, and 1 minute later (5 simple menus) had a season pass to all upcoming episodes. (They will be recorded and kept for at least two days.) I don't even know what channel or what time Nova is showing, and I don't care.

The Tivo is a consumer device: a "personal TV receiver" made by Phillips, currently costing about $400. It records video onto a large hard drive (13 to 30 GB), acting much like a super-VCR. Many more details at http://www.tivo.com/

In many ways, the Tivo is much better than my PC. I leave it on all the time, but I can't stand the noise from my ordinary PC when I'm reading. It crashed *once* in about 4 months, and I simply removed power to reboot it. The Tivo uses Linux as its underlying operating system, but I've never seen anything but the Tivo interface (which is very simple and usable).

I still think a large number of people will want the flexibility of a PC, but the growth of "appliance" computers has been considerable. If high-definition TV becomes popular, televisions will become reasonable-quality monitors, probably with a fairly powerful embedded computer. Then things might get really interesting. --CliffordAdams

(* OK, my TV is a tuner card in my PC. I don't watch enough TV to buy a large television (with S-Video input) and furniture to watch it comfortably.)

I was going to link to CircleOfReincarnation below, but it doesn't say what I mean in this context. So instead of editing that page and linking to it here, I'm going to edit this one directly. Passive-aggressive editing isn't exactly my forte. ;)

It's difficult to get the balance between modularity and connectedness right. Unix guys (like me) are willing to deal with individual pieces that have the complexity of a single-celled animal and connect them into temporary solutions that have more complexity in the plumbing than in the parts. Windows programmers and users seem to prefer more monolithic solutions that are extremely difficult to hook together. (WindowsScriptingHost and DotNet might be changing this, but how much that will affect third-party application design and the practice of end users remains to be seen.) Modularity gives you flexibility, connectedness gives you simplicity.

Our entertainment needs have been met by very modular solutions for decades. We can buy one set of headphones, for example, and use them in nearly all contexts where an entertainment device provides an audio output. A given VCR will talk to a given TV even if one device is twenty years older than the other. And so on. This has made it cheaper to buy individual components due to the effects of commoditization in the marketplace, and it has made it easer: The only factors to consider when buying headphones are related to comfort and sound quality, not whether the plug will fit in the CD players and portable radios you already own. The factors to consider when buying a TV are size, picture quality, and sound quality, not whether it will be able to talk to the VCR you bought during the 80s and the DVD player you bought a few weeks ago. There is no meaningful ConnectorConspiracy? in the home entertainment market. (DigitalRightsManagement may (in some small ways already has) changed this.)

Consumers seem to like the foregoing, and can probably scarce imagine a world where it is not true.

It is helpful to consider the failure of all attempts to date at unifying the home entertainment system into a single monolithic appliance. TVs which contain their own VCR are fairly rare, even though they have been available for some time now. A TV capable of receiving AM and FM radio and playing audio tapes, CDs, DVDs, and VHS tapes is possible, but I've never seen such a beast. (Has anyone here?) This could be attributed solely to how much such a thing would cost, and how much of an investment in current technology would be wasted, but how much of an investment in typewriters was wasted when PCs gained word processing programs?

It might be that interface complexity rises as an appliance gains new features, and people are loathe to learn completely new ways of doing things. This could be countered by saying that a monolithic entertainment appliance would have a unified interface and that all functions could be accessed by navigating a graphical menu system of some form (or something equivalent), but navigation is hard. It takes work to remember where everything is, as opposed to the current system where every individual device has an interface simple enough to be mostly contained on a front panel or a small remote control. (Large universal remotes may be a counterexample, but they can also be explained by how annoying it is to keep track of three remotes instead of one large one.)

User interface design is hard. The entertainment device industry seems to have won big by focusing on simplicity. I wonder how many Unix guys they employ. ;)

TVs which contain their own VCR are fairly rare, even though they have been available for some time now.

Not true. 15% of all VCRs sold in 2005 were TV/VCR combos. 20% of all DVD players sold in 2005 were TV/DVD combos. The TV/DVD combo market grew by 53% over 2004 and was the only segment measured on CEA's video industry sales scorecard that didn't shrink in 2005. The contributors to this wiki may enjoy modular solutions (I would have loved to buy a big screen TV with no speakers in it, for instance) but my mom hates them. She doesn't want to connect anything but a power cable. In my experience most consumers more closely resemble my mom than me. They buy components when they have to, but will take combos if given a choice. -- EricHodges

How come VCR combos didn't become a success and DVD combos did? 15% after more than a decade (I remember them from high school) is not quite dismal but certainly marginal.

TV/VCR combos were a success. In the mid 1990s they were the fastest growing segment of color TV sales. This page demonstrates why computer programmers (especially "Unix guys") should avoid anecdotal or personal evidence when predicting what users want. Technology that seems lame to us often fills needs we don't share with the majority of the population. -- EH

[I went from personal experience and what I see on sale whenever I wander into the electronics section at Sears or Wal-Mart or K-Mart. The citation of 'my mom' is even worse when it comes to 'anecdotal or personal evidence'. Besides, 15%-20% is hardly taking the world by storm even in a large market. Finally: 'In my experience most consumers more closely resemble my mom than me. They buy components when they have to, but will take combos if given a choice.' If this is true, how come no entertainment appliances have succeeded? They have been given the choice, and the answer was no.]

I'm not sure what you mean by "entertainment appliances". A quick google search shows that term applied to computers, TVs, phones, radios and video game consoles. All of those have succeeded. -- EH

The other poster probably wants a single appliance that integrates everything, the same way that appliances in food are integrated in the refrig-micro-stove combo, car-buses have been integrated in the SUV, shopping has been integrated in WalMart, entertainment has been integrated in Extreme Movie Watching, and leather and satin ... I'm not even going there. Obviously these are the heights of consumer choice and sensibility in their respective fields.

"fastest growing" doesn't mean anything. Nearly every technology has fantastic growth when it's new. What matters is when it plateaus. And it seems VCR combos plateaued at 15% of the market, which is very far from domination of the market and in no way supports your contention that ordinary people (who far, far outnumber techies) prefer combos. Further, considering that DVD combos achieved 20% of the market in less time than it took VCRs, 15% looks downright pathetic.

Now, it's possible that we're looking at an aging effect where VCR combos used to be as big as, or even bigger than, DVD combos are now but they've declined for some reason. Two reasons I can immediately think of is that VCRs have fallen out of fashion and so any new combo sales will be for DVDs, and/or since VCR combos are older, people are buying more new VCRs as replacements for the broken VCR half of their VCR/TV combo.

TV/VCR combos peaked higher than 15%. I don't have access to CEA's archives to find the data. My point is that TV/VCR combos aren't "fairly rare" and that we shouldn't guess about what users want. -- EH

I wasn't guessing. I was going on what I've actually seen, and it hasn't been combos. As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever seen a TV/DVD-player combo. I might be living in some odd regions (Illinois, Missouri, and Montana mainly). And even if the peak was 20%, that still isn't exactly boiling the ocean.

If you've never seen a TV/DVD combo, go to www.bestbuy.com and type "combo television" in the search field. You don't seem to have researched the topic. Your statements sound more like guesses than measurements. -- EH

AndrewOdlyzko has a lot to say about InformationAppliances? in http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_9/odlyzko/index.html#o3

Also, the PC is undergoing a slow change to a social computer, so even if it's completely general-purpose, it's not going to stay personal for much longer. In the future, only your account on the WorldNet is going to be personal and the particular machine you log in from will be just that, a machine. The PC will become an "appliance" for general-purpose non-task specific computation.