The state of personal computing
Following up on Drunkenbatman’s excellent Yin & Yang article Leslie Michael Orchard has posted a series of ramblings about security-awareness among endusers and how dedicated devices and appliances could improve the situation in four parts: one, two, three, four. I could blockquote them extensively, but i’d rather urge you to go read them now. These are as high-quality as ramblings get.
The idea of convergence has been quite popular for several years now, but i think it’s on the wrong track. People won’t put up with halfdecent functionality packaged together if they can have several devices perfectly tailored towards their needs. Why should they? Computing and consumer electronics are merging and processing power and connectivity are getting dirt cheap. If you have the choice between one dirt-cheap piece of equipment struggling to half-fulfill your needs (think pc) and many dirt-cheap dedicated devices working just as you expect them to work (think ipod for music, playstation 2 for games, linksys nslu2 for home serving , etc.) which way would you go?
I think centralized, access-everywhere web applications will also play a big role in this. As it stands now the web is bloated with legacy markup ballast holding it back, making it nigh-unusable anywhere but in highly-evolved browsers which are almost exclusively available on personal computers. But this will change with the evolvement of the mobile web, tailored towards incredibly simple devices with primitive browsers respecting web standards (namely xhtml-mp). It’s just too big a potential market to ignore.
Of course there’s this danger of losing control over your machine and this is a prospect many alpha-geeks won’t be comfortable with, but most people these days have never been in control of their machines. They have little to lose and much to gain. And for us geeks i believe that a stronger fragmentation of services and associated physical devices into interoperable appliances can’t succeed without open standards and that further development of digital living will still depend on the tinkering and toying of people who like to get their hands dirty. Business plans make for poor innovations and poorer revolutions, even digital ones.