Japanese electronics use is perhaps a faulty bellwether for the American market. Whereas new gadgets are often available in Japan long before they make their appearance (if ever) in the US, there are also interesting cultural differences that don’t always translate popularity. There does seem to be a trend in the area of PC sales, however. An AP article today points out that PCs are taking a less important role in Japanese households with the emergence of smart phones, consoles that can reproduce many PC functions (web browsing, gaming, playing DVDs & music), and flat screen TVs (versus flat screen monitors, say). If you can check your email on your phone, listen to music on your iPod, download music on your Wii, and play games on your 52″ LCD, why would you want a computer in your home? Note: throughout this post I will use the term PC in the general sense of computer, rather than specifically as an IBM-compatible PC.
So this got me thinking about what a PC is good for and why I liked it back in the day (well, I still like it).My first introduction to the PC was a commercial for the Coleco Adam. And really, given these great ads, can you blame my 6-year-old self from being totally swept up in the magic? I love the last ad in the video below. Buy a ColecoVision, get a free Cabbage Patch kid. The tagline: “When you buy a CollecoVision, you make two kids happy.” It’s interesting too in that it’s implicit that girls should care about dolls and boys should care about electronics.
So probably my earliest motivation for wanting a PC was the gaming potential. There were also cartoons like Inspector Gadget that showed computers being extremely powerful little toys. When I actually first got to use a PC, I was in the fifth grade. I instantly took to it. We were using a lab of Apple IIc (and IIe) in school and programming simple things in Basic. It made complete sense to me and the pace of the teacher’s lesson was agonizingly slow. I wanted to run ahead and write new programs. So I also talked to my teacher and got some extra time in the lab after school hours.
In the sixth grade, we moved in with my second stepfather and he had a TRS-80 Model III(aka trash-80). A lovely hunk of junk. Two floppy (5.25″) drives and no hard drive. I played around on it for hours, exploring the world of the Basic programming language. It was great. I made a rock, paper, scissors game, tic-tac-toe, and used it for scientific simulations. These were, of course, naive and simplistic, but looking back it was an early indicator of my interest in research. I used the computer to not just play games and solve problems (by writing programs), but to explore ideas and explore the realm of what computers were capable of doing. I really would have benefitted from having someone around who knew about computer science. But maybe forced direction would have turned me off, hard to say.
In high school, my friends (Josh and John mainly) and I also used PCs to produce some cool fractals. Mandelbrot set mostly. Back then, Pascal was the vogue. My stepfather actually bought Turbo Pascal, for some reason. I’m not sure if he was thinking of taking up programming himself or if it was a roundabout way of getting it for me (which would be a rare occurrence indeed). So it was the first Object Oriented Programming language I was exposed to and the manuals made no sense whatsoever. I mean, it made sense to think of an apple as an object, without having to model the skin and the core and the seeds and whatever, but how did that translate to computer programs? Again, I would’ve benefitted from some compsci guidance.
So I created a mindmap of what I could think of as the primary uses for PCs that most Americans engage in. Mindmaps are something I want to go into further in a future post. So the six main categories of usage are web, work, entertainment, communication, programming, financial, and web. These categories certainly bleed over into each other at many different places. In the case of the web, it could be any one of the other categories. Increasingly, it is becoming all of them. Since it was a component of all I decided to make it its own category.
Next thing to consider is what devices support these activities. An iPhone can play music, surf the web, play YouTube videos, check email, and handle communications (IM and voice). If those functions are all you need your PC for, having an iPhone could impact your PC usage. Likewise, Google Docs (and similar offerings) make it easier to do office-style tasks on the web. Rather than needing a PC now, all you would need is a web appliance. These aren’t especially popular, so I wouldn’t consider this an area where PCs are facing competition, but it’s possible. Gaming consoles are encroaching on the PC popular quite a bit more and appear to be hoping to continue that trend with no end in sight.
So as the major functionality of the PC is transitioned to other, more focused devices, the need for many niche users to have a PC is waning. Does this spell trouble for major PC manufacturers like Dell, HP, and so on?
Nope. Countries that haven’t seen PCs before are seeing sales increase enormously. So the markets are shifting. I hope as the US market begins to transition away from the multipurpose all-in-one PC, we’ll begin to see some sort of device for the power-user/programmer begin to emerge. I don’t have a specific vision for this device, or else I’d be out making it. But I want it to facilitate the things I use my PC for: programming, data analysis, graphical visualizations (and of course, web surfing and games). Give me a super computer in a box that is more devoted towards giving me full power rather than a dumbed down interface that looks pretty.
But it’s more than just the operating system, I want the device optimized for these tasks. Maybe a laptop with a fold-out screen. Right now I have widescreen at 1280×800 on my laptop. If the screen were a doubled-over fold out, that could be increased to 2560×800 — essentially a dual monitor laptop – a must have for developers. How about built-in support for stack tracing and system performance monitoring that runs in hardware so when the OS starts to die, your performance monitors don’t die with it?
If anyone has stayed with me to this point, I’m curious what other people want out of their PC.
