The E-Business Software Weekly is a series profiling trends and developments in software and applications that support e-business, the Internet, and other electronic communication channels. Look for a new story each week in this space.
Reflections on an Anniversary
It isn't often that a 20-year-old's birthday garners worldwide media attention. But then the birthday that fell on August 12 was something of a special one, a commemoration of surpassing significance to the business and technology communities alike: the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM personal computer. And, with it, the dawn of the personal computing age.
The setting: a press conference in New York City. IBM, at the time the dominant force in mainframe computing, regularly made new product announcements at events like these, but the product to be previewed this time was different than anything the company's previous line of computing devices could have foreshadowed: a smart, self-contained computer designed to operate directly on users' desktops. Although the computational capabilities of computers had long been available via massive internal networks to educational, scientific, and larger business institutions, the personal computer for the first time promised to make this power widely available to individuals.
Modeled in certain respects on the MITS hobbyist computer and Apple's recently introduced Apple II, the IBM personal computer not only launched an entirely new computing platform, but it proved that personal computers could have serious purposes that would come to dwarf the recreational and hobbyist roles that its predecessors had played. Indeed, its backers confidently asserted that the personal computer would finally bring to pass the "information revolution" that futurists had long forecast, and in so doing would dramatically change the ways in which people lived, worked, and did business.
It was a bold prediction. At the time, for example, only about 10% of the typewriters in the 500 largest industrial corporations had ever been replaced, evidence of a target market not particularly inclined toward rapid change. Still, analysts were optimistic about the potential for the PC, courageously projecting that the number of personal computers in use by the end of the century could grow to as many as 80 million. The prediction, It turned out, was wildly off the mark. By the end of 2000, there were actually 500 million PCs in use worldwide, and the number of computing devices was expected to continuing rising sharply throughout the early years of the 21st century.
What a difference twenty years could make.
A New Computing Metaphor
In many ways, the birth of the personal computer epitomized the insurgent, garage-style development process that would govern the computing, software, and Internet sectors for much of the succeeding two decades. Rather than being a product of IBM's Armonk, N.Y., headquarters, as most of IBM's mainframe innovations were, the PC originated at a small IBM facility called the Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton, Fla. The facility's head, IBM veteran Bill Lowe, had urged IBM executives to use a radical new process to manufacture the personal computer: build it, not from IBM-made parts (as was the company's standard practice), but instead from mix-and-match components made by other companies.
Lowe's recommendation was prompted mainly by economics. Senior IBM executives had given him a one-year deadline to bring the PC to market, a goal that would have been impossible to meet had he been required to design and fabricate the parts internally. He further realized that the relatively high costs of internal design and production were inconsistent with the price structure that the company's retail-focused market penetration strategy demanded. The need to constrain costs also dictated having distributors, rather than IBM, service the computers-an arrangement that added still more weight to the argument for using standardized, off-the-shelf components.
And so Lowe and his colleagues went on a reconnaissance mission, searching for partners and suppliers for IBM's new computing venture. Many analysts now credit this one decision for launching the revolution of the computer industry. Dave Bradley, an IBM engineer involved in the original PC development program, told CNN.com that, by turning to an "open," component-based manufacturing model, IBM effectively "invited the rest of the industry to participate" in the development process." This "paved the way for thousands of companies in the PC sector."
Among them: Lotus Development Corp., which created one of the first software applications for the PC; Intel, which supplied the processor for the PC (as it had for one of the IBM's PC predecessors), and a small, Bellevue, Wash., based company called Microsoft.
Barely out of its startup stage, Microsoft, it should be noted, wasn't IBM's first choice. Instead, IBM had decided to use Digital Research Corporation's CP/M-at the time, the most popular non-Apple OS-as the operating system for its new personal computer. But Digital Research Corp., with designs of its own on the desktop computing market, turned IBM down. So Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who were already supplying a version of BASIC to serve as the IBM PC programming language, offered to provide the operating system as well.
Unfortunately, Microsoft did not have an operating system of its own-and so it quickly had to acquire one. As a CNN report notes, Paul Allen managed to locate a local hardware vendor, Seattle Computer Products, that had developed a suitable OS. Facing the unforgiving IBM deadline, Microsoft secured the operating system, which later became the foundation for DOS and, ultimately, Windows. It was a crucial decision. As IBM's Bill Lowe tells CNN.com, his company chose Microsoft in large part because it could meet the delivery deadline. "We put a real premium on schedule," he says. "They were able to provide an operating system on the schedule we needed."
The PC's Far-Reaching Effects
Microsoft. Intel. Lotus. Compaq (which shortly afterward began manufacturing IBM compatible PCs). And scores of other companies. Not a shabby graduating class for the first year of the personal computer. Indeed, one could reasonably argue that the majority of today's wealth in the computer hardware and software sectors ultimately originated from that single new product announcement in the summer of 1981.
But the personal computer has had other, equally far-reaching effects on the lives and well-being not just of the American populace, but of people throughout the world. Among its most significant consequences:
Because of the efficiencies it introduced, the personal computer helped fuel the surging economy of the past two decades. Various surveys suggest that the PC and related technologies have been responsible for as much as half or more of the U.S. per capita productivity gains over this time. On a larger scale, PC-based efficiencies have also played a key role in the nation's economic performance of the two decades between 1983 and 2001-the longest stretch of nearly unbroken economic growth in U.S. history.
The personal computer-probably more so than any other recent technological advance-has made it possible for increasingly resource-constrained business employees to do more with less. Consider two relatively prosaic examples. With a computer, written documents can be produced and replicated several times faster than on a typewriter-and, typically, to a higher quality. Likewise, electronic spreadsheets, which were first made feasible on a wide scale by the PC, have increased the precision with which companies can manage their financial operations. These and many other day-to-day benefits of personal computing have improved the conduct of business in ways that are not necessarily captured by government statistics.
Even before the advent of the Internet, the personal computer accelerated the trend toward economic globalization. For instance, portable computers, introduced in the mid-1980s, made it easier than ever before for business executives to travel and do business in other countries. Personal computers also made it simpler to transfer files electronically (even though the early methods of doing so were quite cumbersome), increasing the speed and distances at which business could operate. Indeed, one could even argue that the fixed ASCII character set, with its bias toward languages based on the Roman alphabet, helped to solidify the position of English as the standard language of international business-another key factor in economic globalization.
Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the personal computer not only made possible but affirmatively encouraged the rapid expansion of the Internet in the late 1990s, for it is only through the PC that a critical mass of people were able to gain access to and realize the benefits of the Internet. The availability of inexpensive PCs also served as the technological foundation for the legions of startups and programmers responsible for the explosion of software, Web sites, and e-businesses during that time. Where all of this will ultimately lead remains uncertain, but even now-just as the PC's early champions predicted-it is clear that personal computers and the PC-fueled Internet have forever changed the ways in which people live, work, and do business.
The Future of Personal Computing
If this much has been achieved in the PC's first twenty years, one can only imagine what will happen during the next twenty. In fact, a great many people have tried to imagine this future. One of them is John P. Karidis, the IBM Distinguished Engineer who designed many of the technological innovations that made IBM's ThinkPad one of the world's leading laptop computers, and who knows more than a thing or two about the upward progress of personal computing.
The bottom line, says Seybold, is that customers will increasingly "vote with their loyalty." They will "no longer tolerate being treated as if they weren't important. They now know how much clout they have." In particular, they will refuse to do business with companies that don't listen to them, that don't offer them what they need, and that don't respect their time.
Karidis believes that personal computing will continue to evolve over the next two decades, but even with the relatively profound changes in the making, he doubts that the PC as we know it will disappear. A key reason, he recently told C|Net, is that PCs offer a "more natural way for people to do large amounts of content creation." As a result, "we're not going to see the end of the PC. We're going to see more devices available. You'll see the traditional PC workload moving back to the server or out to the handheld devices, but we will still have full-function PCs to cover the high end of the computing market. We'll also see PCs coming out in a variety of different forms."
The most prominent of these new forms, Karidis believes, will be wireless PCs, particularly laptops and other portables. Although some of the early wireless data pioneers, like Metricom, have failed to generate sufficient business and subsequently terminated their wireless services, other providers will surely spring up, to the point that nearly all portable computing devices in the future are likely to communicate wirelessly. In fact, Karidis believes that "gradations of mobility may be the [key] differentiator of PC devices twenty years hence."
Other changes are likely to include enhancements that enable portable computing devices to deliver desktop-class performance, such as greatly increased processing power, "virtual," close-to-the-eye display technologies that simulate large desktop monitors, and more efficient data-input technologies like "virtual" keyboards, improved handwriting-to-text conversion, and more accurate voice recognition. Taken together, these technologies should remove most of the remaining impediments that have made mobile computing, for many, a second-class citizen to desktop computing.
Finally, and perhaps the most far-reaching of the developments that Karidis anticipates will take place over the next twenty years, are the changes to come is the ways in which people view computers. Karidis and his colleagues at IBM predict that, in coming years, personal computers "will not act primarily as standalone processors or on-ramps to the information superhighway. Rather, devices for personal computing will increasingly become part of a larger infrastructure, bringing the information and function of the entire infrastructure to the individual."
Computing Becomes Pervasive
IBM calls this concept "pervasive computing," and it promises to be as revolutionary as the personal computing paradigm that preceded it. Note Karidis and his colleagues: "Just as the notebook PC is becoming as ubiquitous as the boxy, beige desktop once was, other forms and styles of PCs will develop by 2021. As computing becomes pervasive-everywhere, all-the-time, taken for granted-the PC of today will evolve into its own pervasive forms. Wearable PCs, handheld PCs, and tablet PCs can be envisioned today, and many other PC devices may be in common use twenty years from now."
The effect on e-business? Quite simply, nearly all business will be e-business. Just as it now makes little sense to distinguish among businesses that use personal computers and those that don't, twenty years from now (or sooner) it will be irrelevant to classify companies as to whether or not they are e-businesses. All businesses will "plug in" to a pervasive computing infrastructure that instantaneously carries data and transactions throughout the world. The companies that succeed in this environment will differ from those that don't not by the fact that they employ electronic data channels, but by the efficiency and creativity with which they do so.
Indeed, twenty years from now, computing and data transmission capabilities may even fade into the background, a part of the business landscape as expected and unexceptional as telephone lines and postal service are today. Unable to differentiate themselves with the "e" in front of their name or service, companies will have to learn to depend once again on the fundamentals of good business, creating great new products capable of meeting people's needs and desires in ways previously unimagined
And that, in the end, may be the most exciting development of all.
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