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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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NOVEMBER 4, 2003
The Many Shapes of Tomorrow's PC [Page 2 of 2] The Network Becomes the Computer In the 1990s, Sun CEO Scott McNealy pushed the idea of the "Network PC" -- a dummed-down personal computer tied to a powerful network. The idea never took root in corporations, but a variation of it eventually could with consumers. The theory of why goes like this: Soon, the U.S. will be blanketed with wireless broadband connectivity. At the same time, broadband DSL or cable-modem service is finally becoming available in a majority of U.S. communities. So are advanced digital cell-phone networks. The upshot is that consumers at home and businesspeople on the road will soon be able to get a fast signal almost anywhere. That will make it possible for them to do things that now require a PC without one -- since every terminal will become their personal PC. They could plug their PDA into a jack and grab all the data they need from their home PC 2,500 miles away -- just as corporations have been doing for some time with network drives and centralized mail servers. FLEXIBLE DISPLAYS. In such a world, the laptop would be mainly a hedge against a lack of connectivity -- a device that lets workers be productive mainly when and if they can't establish a high-speed connection. As online computing becomes more reliable, the need for that hedge will start to disappear. "We're focusing on simpler clients and devices that move more of the data into the network," says Robert Morris, director of IBM's Almaden Research Center. That still leaves an ergonomic problem of tiny screens. But IBM's Morris believes that engineers will figure out ways to maintain the current form factor of PC displays -- something that at a minimum is 8 inches by 11 inches, like paper, and therefore easy on the eyes. What will change is the displays will become more flexible, sometimes literally -- in the case of organic light emitting diodes that could lead to monitors as thin as posters and just as easy to roll up. In other cases, users will plug a device into a network right next to a suitable display -- say, on the back of the seat in front of you on a train ride and use the data as needed without squinting at a tiny screen. Storage, Storage Everywhere For now, Morris notes, such networks remain too new and unreliable for his scenario to completely play out. "This is going to take some time," he says. "So what we'll do for quite a number of years is keep storage on the client [the PC] to be used as a cache. Storage will be used to cover the sins of the network, which is still narrowband." That's a cheap, common-sense interim solution. Today, 40-gigabyte hard drives are standard on PCs -- and cost only about $40 or $50. And terabyte internal drives are on the drawing board. These would make storage of vast quantities of information an increasingly trivial task -- and would open up new uses for PCs and their cousins with PC capabilities. Cheap mega-storage means personal video recorders could be expanded to contain hundreds of movie titles as well as entire music libraries including hundreds of thousands of songs -- all pre-installed on a machine and waiting for credit-card activation. Such warehouse-size PCs are already starting to appear. Microsoft and Apple (AAPL ) both have put together software and hardware combinations specifically for memory-intensive media such as film and music. And while networks outside the home might remain immature, building a high-speed network within four walls has become so easy that the concept of a media server -- a PC dedicated to serving the media needs of a household -- could attain mainstream acceptance within the next five years. BROADER DEFINITION. TiVO, the groundbreaking personal video recorder system that allows users to store hours of programming on a hard drive and watch at their own leisure, is nearly plug-and-play. That already goes a long way toward illustrating how the media server idea could work. Should the concept expand beyond mere video on a single TV to multipurpose servers providing all sorts of capabilities to connected terminals and monitors throughout a house, consumers might see less need to buy multiple PCs per household. Thanks to these trends, among others, the PC business is entering an era of upheaval. The current PC world will remain intact, selling lots of boxes to companies and consumers for years to come. But the definition of a PC is broadening. So are the ways in which PCs or devices with PC capabilities are used, powered, and connected to networks. From the garage to the ubiquitous desktop to millions of laptops took three decades. The coming transition could take that long. But it's clearly under way.
 By Alex Salkever, Technology editor for BusinessWeek Online
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