Pen computers: the next wave

Ubiquitous mobile computing promises to revolutionize the computer industry. Atstake: the Microsoft DOS/Intel X86 duopoly, and much more. The transition provides a case study of the cyclical technological substitutions that regularly uproot the computer industry.

Consider this scenario: A few farsighted companies recognize the potential of a new technology, mate it with the best of existing complementary technologies and create an interesting and innovative new product.

The new product solves specific problems in vertical applications. In time, it is generalized to a larger audience. They offer enough new functionality to persuade customers to buy them. Despite barriers--a certain level of incompatibility with the installed base and an unknown cost/benefit--the new products succeed.

Such cycles epitomize the computer industry. Minicomputers, personal computers, fault-tolerant computers and many products revolutionized the industry in the same way. They upset the status quo when it seemed unshakable.

Pen computer systems represent the largest threat to date to the near-monopolistic dominance of two great American companies. Most of the new systems are centered around low-power RISC chips, and they run operating systems designed to maximize pen power.

The Intel/Microsoft duopoly and a growing network of pen-based companies will coexist during the acute growth of the new market over the next five years. Pen Windows will run the applications sponsored and authored by large, conservative users. Organizations with existing investments in Windows will gradually move to the new hardware platform, but will not abandon their investments in Windows.

Suppliers of alternative technology have a harder mission. Their problem is product definition. Their new products must offer compelling reasons not to go to Windows pen systems and notebooks.

The need to combine breakthrough hardware (size, weight, pen, storage, networking) with breakthrough software (simple systems software, exciting and relevant applications, ease of use) creates a unique situation: the need for integrated suppliers. The most successful suppliers will tightly couple hardware and software in their products. Indeed, some pen software suppliers will bundle vertical-market applications with their products. Such prognostication seems to fly in the face of IDC's disintegration theory.

It won't last long. Once the applications for such devices are well defined, once the standard software interfaces are clarified and once useful form factors have been established, the process of disintegration will again roll. Until then, the competition is more focused on building agreements and rationalizing vision than building products. Small companies are attempting to overcome the barriers their integrated foes have already addressed.

The pen/mobile/ubiquitous computing paradigm is the next step in the evolution of the glass-house computer to a consumer product. It's an important step, equally as important as the VAX, the Intel/Microsoft duopoly and the Mac. Each step put muscle behind the "computers for the rest of us" approach to marketing with which companies have been addressing IBM for three decades.

But with each successive step the practicality of the original utopian vision becomes more questionable. Surely the pen metaphor and the possibilities of boundless ubiquitous networks will make some people more productive. But does every member of society need a computer? Does everyone want one? Where do we draw the line between our businesses and our lives?

In 20 years we might look back at 1993 as the year that computers finally became a consumer product. It may well be the year the information age began to embed itself so deeply into our lives that it became our lives. Mobile computing -- in at least some of its many current shapes -- is here to stay.

Companies will ready themselves for the metamorphoses wrought by very inexpensive pen hardware, unbounded networks and new software paradigms in two ways. Some will jump to the new technology blind, some will cling to their old platforms. Either strategy on its own is shortsighted. A cautious and optimistic approach, concurrently, will serve them best. The appeal and use of new technology will not wait.

COPYRIGHT 1992 International Data Corporation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group