Thinking Inside The Box - microcomputer design - Industry Trend or Event

Industry Standard, The, May 21, 2001 by Michael Mechanic

Two decades after IBM introduced its PC, the beige box hasn't changed all that much. Where has all the innovation gone?

It was 20 years ago this summer that IBM introduced its beige box to the business world. The IBM PC helped launch a revolution that turned a geeky kid with big dreams into the world's richest man, propelled a small chipmaker called Intel into the Fortune 50 and wrote the blueprint for the fortunes of Compaq, Dell, Gateway -- indeed, an entire industry.

But IBM failed to keep pace with the companies it helped spawn. You'd think that would have taught the nascent industry a crucial lesson: Innovate or die. A handful of computer companies -- most notably, Apple -- followed that advice. But many more (especially, critics say, Microsoft) flourished by avoiding it, settling instead for a series of incremental software and hardware tweaks, maintaining the status quo and ignoring any creative impulse.

"It's incredibly hard for new platforms to get established," laments Andy Hertzfeld, who programmed the original Macintosh interface in the early '80s and now runs a company called Eazel that's working on a friendlier Linux interface. "Add to the picture a psychotically competitive, giant monster that wants to crush any new platform as it's being born, and that's the state of the computer industry over the past 15 years."

Not that there hasn't been progress. Computers have grown faster and more powerful. Graphics have improved tremendously, fueled in part by demand from garners. Laptops have made computing portable. Desktop publishing has transformed the printing and graphic-design industries. Browser software made the Web possible, leading to global communication on a scale that could hardly have been imagined two decades ago. And wireless and other networking technologies promise to keep us connected no matter where we are.

Yet the pervasiveness of PCs makes their shortcomings that much more obvious. Most machines still look like those early IBM units -- clunky eyesores that home users stow under a desk in the back room. Desktop units are tethered to a bunch of barely compatible devices by a jumble of cables. Displays are cumbersome; standard mouse and keyboard inputs are ill-suited to the human body. Software is no better. Programs are bloated with features and require considerable training and practice to master. The desktop-folder metaphor is outdated. Users are forced to carry out housekeeping chores like manually allocating memory and saving files. And because of hardware and software incompatibilities, machines crash more than ever.

Not coincidentally, desktop sales have flattened and laptop sales have declined. The fact is, PCs are becoming like washing machines: Most households have one, but why buy another until the old one breaks? Naturally, the industry doesn't much care for this business model. So it's looking for new ways to goose the PC market.

One way to do that is to make PCs less of a pain to use. There was no shortage of suggestions at CHI 2001, a recent Seattle conference where 3,000 computer scientists touted everything from 3D gear to fresh file-storage paradigms to helpful onscreen avatars. Conference headliner Bill Gates didn't duck the usability issue in his speech. With a cryptic Windows error message projected onto the screen behind him, Gates admitted complicity. Among the problems users face, he cited complex software, difficulties syncing up devices and a jungle of usernames, passwords and search methods. "The PC," Gates told the audience, "is too hard to learn and use."

Microsoft certainly has the money -- in the form of a $4 billion R&D budget -- to address those problems. Redmond's priorities are built around networking. There's the .Net initiative, which will connect all sorts of devices to all sorts of services via XML, and the HailStorm platform, which will make it easier for Web developers to offer instant messaging, file storage and other utilities. But Gates says that PC-based speech and handwriting recognition are also important to Microsoft. And the company hopes to revive pen computing with its Tablet PC [see story, page 66].

Intel is also hoping to change the way people view the PC. In a demo room on the chipmaker's vast Hillsboro, Ore., campus, consumer education manager Ralph Bond shows off a toy microscope, a snazzy Web camera and a computer sound morpher that looks like a cross between a remote control and a baby's pacifier. These new-wave PC peripherals are part of the company's "extended PC" strategy, which aims to move the machines out of the study and into the social centers of the home. "We're designing what amounts to a PC that will sit comfortably with your entertainment equipment," says consumer concepts manager Eric Dishman.

Sony, Nintendo and a slew of other home entertainment companies share this same vision of the future, in which the PC is just one part of a networked whole that includes the game console, television, stereo, phones, pagers and PDAS. If the companies succeed in making that vision a reality, and in making computers as error-free as the fridge, a vast new market -- the 44 percent of U.S. households that still don't own a computer -- could finally open up.