In search of the PC of the future

Rethink IT, Dec, 2004

The world spends an awful lot of time wondering what software will be in future PCs, but not so much time figuring out what they will look like, what they might cost and different ways in which the enterprise might decide to put them to work.

There has been a tendency over tile past three or four generations of the Windows operating system to never consider anything, at least at the client level, other than upgrading to the prevailing version, regardless of what hardware that decision necessitates.

Enterprises now are just on the verge of starting to think about using Linux for handfuls of desktop activities, and in some instances moving off the Windows beaten track altogether and jumping wholeheartedly onto the Linux bandwagon.

And by doing that Microsoft will lose some of its ability to decide just what a PC will need in hardware terms to sell in the market as an enterprise device.

But over time bulky desktops will become a thing of the past. Desktops have only survived this long because various Microsoft options have required big upgrades in computing power, memory and disk, and manufacturers couldn't fit them all into a small enough box to give us all laptops with the same kind of power for a small enough price.

That is now changing and clearly, the laptop is rapidly on the rise

In 2007 notebooks will make up around 65m of the 175m PC devices shipped. Not quite a majority but well on the way to 40% of the market.

One of the commonest terms in laptops now is 'desktop replacement', which some companies abbreviate to 'DeskNotes'.

At the moment these devices weigh 8lbs or more and have 15-inch to 17-inch screens, composite keyboards, at least 80Gb of disk, plentiful USBs and usually rely on a docking station for much of their higher speed communications.

They have finally got the price substantially under $2,000 and now include dual CD-DVD combo drives, both writers and rewriters, in-built (Centrino) Wi-Fi and more disk than you could use on email in a lifetime.

But increasingly there are laptops that you really can consider carrying about with you, both inside an office and home and back every night.

These come in gradations all the way down to under 4lbs devices which sacrifice a little on the screen size and end up at about 10.5-inches, they have a little less disk, which is usually a bit slower, along with a slower processor, in order to save power and extend battery life. But is that the end of where PCs are going?

We should be able to bring that sized device up to desktop PC specification levels in just a few years, but is that it?

Well, let's dig underneath the motivation for laptops first, to see what clues this might give us.

What component suppliers are doing to drive the form factor downwards is usually paid for out of some kind of measurable productivity improvements.

These come in a number of ways: allowing work on the move; allowing connections on the move; allowing employees to work at home and allowing an 'always on' email (or other "presence') connection .

Rethink IT spoke to the CIO of Intel in a previous article and he told us how he had been totally against mobility for years, but had ended up insisting on it.

The proving point for laptops was when he discovered that the cost of ownership was $800 more per year for laptops, and that this amounted to 30 minutes extra work a week per employee in order to pay it back. When he measured laptop workers' outputs, he found they 'donated' between three hours and eight hours of their 'free' time to the company (even if most of it was commuting time to and from work) when they had laptops.

Taking this into account enterpriscwide, it would mean that more could be done with fewer employees when they all had laptops, so he gave them to everyone.

There were similar cost calculations when PCs came in initially, and the sight of a lonesome office worker, queuing up for his or her go on the PC is now a picture from way back in our past. It seems silly now, when we look back on it, to employ someone who is, in many cases, essentially an information worker, and then deprive them of the information they need to do their jobs.

In large enterprises that's almost everyone, and the corollary is also true, that the greater part of their time that they have ALL their corporate information available to them, the MORE productivity is obtained from enterprise employees.

This is perhaps why there have been more and more experiments with the PC form factor. In 2002 Microsoft pioneered the tablet PC. This was pretty much an unmitigated disaster, and remains less than 1% of PCs shipped today.

The same rules applied to these as applied to laptops before them. The smaller something is, the more expensive it is. And within that form factor, the faster devices which perform closer to the desktop cost even more.

So for two years now people have bleated about the tablet PC being too expensive, and that it doesn't have enough applications, but that when this is fixed, it will come into its own.

The difference here was that tablet PCs were not only normal PCs that were smaller, but they were also redesigned to work differently. Once a device gets too small there is a temptation to do away with the keyboard and use a stylus for input and once you do that there's a temptation to use handwriting and both store it and try to interpret it using recognition software. It's then that you realize you have a brand new architecture and you don't have the applications for it.