I have been following the writings and speeches of Professor David Gelernter of Yale University for several years. He is a really smart guy and has great perspective on the future of information technology. Most recently I read with great interest Dr. Gelernter’s contribution to the Wall Street Journal and the letters to the editor which have been appearing in response. The basic premise of the good professor’s essay is that innovation in the personal computer space is dead and that information technology vendors are not stepping up to the major issues of users. In some respects I agree with him but as a veteran of the PC business (several of my short thirty-five years at IBM) and an avid PC hobbyist since the days of the Radio Shack TRS-80 (1977), I believe there are a few additional factors to be considered.
I think of the Personal Computer in two different ways. First as a standalone computer that I use for some number of hours per day with application software such as Quicken for financial matters and Movable Type and Dreamweaver for managing my blog and patrickWeb. Secondly, I think of the PC as one of a number of devices that I use to connect to the Internet to interact with business, entertainment and information services such as Amazon, eBay, eFax, CopyTalk, Netflix, Weather Underground, Google News, and iTunes. Let’s examine innovation in each of the two categories — PC as a computer on my desk, and PC as one of many devices connected to the Internet.
In the first category, I would have to say I mostly agree with Professor Gelernter that innovation has been limited — not by the IT industry but by a legal monopoly that controls 90+ percent of the desktops. The operating system changes when Microsoft decides to change it. Apple and Linux are making inroads but history has shown that when your market share is 5% or less it is very difficult to compete. Clearly, innovation is way past due in the way our PC’s work under Windows. For example, consider the fact that in order to print something you select the "file" menu and to stop your computer you have to first press the "start" button. These arcane ways we have become accustomed to are that way for one simple reason — that is how Windows works and to make a Windows application work you have to follow the rules of Windows. There are some exceptions to the slow pace of operating system innovation. In the server arena — the computers that serve web pages and applications to people with browsers — Linux has made great strides and continues to gain share. In large complex computing environments, IBM has made very large strides with autonomic computing to make servers "self healing". In the mobile segment, the IBM ThinkPad has seen many innovations since it was introduced in 1992 including the trackpoint, the biometric finger-print reader, and many other leading edge innovations. There is also innovation going on in the browser. A small public company in Norway called Opera provides millions of free downloads of a revolutionary browser that uses voice — you can talk to it and it talks to you. It also uses mouse gesturing to allow a fast and natural way to interact with Web sites and it runs on Linux, Windows, the Mac, a dozen or so different mobile phones, and on TV set-top boxes. (Disclosure: I am an investor and director in Opera Software ASA).
In the second category — PC as one of many devices connected to the Internet — the era of the dominant PC is over. The PC is no longer the hub of innovation for the IT industry — it has not been for more than a decade. The emergence and ubiquity of the Internet, with the promise of always-on computing, has created demand for a host of other options to be connected. The huge growth of personal digital assistants, mobile telephones, and soon WiFi phones is pushing the traditional PC into a niche market — one that is not growing nearly as fast as the market for alternative devices.
The real innovation that is driving the IT industry is in the software, servers, and services that are at the other end of the Internet from the consumer and business devices. For example, the software that manages millions of devices (a fraction of them being traditional PC’s) and network connections accessing inventory data about products with RFID tags will result in major efficiencies across the supply chain. VoIP (voice over the Internet) will have a similar impact in customer relationship management. The result of these innovations will be to allow businesses and individuals to extract ever greater value from technology and move them closer to an On Demand world — getting access to the data and processes they need whenever they need it, wherever they are, and with whatever kind of device they may be using to connect to the Internet. A by-product will be higher growth in the IT industry.
IBM is a major player in the On Demand arena and the company’s move to a different business model for PCs is not surprising. IBM’s margins and growth are driven by high-value solutions required by customers around the world. As a follower of IBM’s strategy I can see their more two dozen acquisitions in the last few years fitting into this strategy very nicely. IBM was a key part of the evolution of the PC era, but the entire industry has evolved, and IBM is evolving with it by exiting low margin businesses and investing in high margin businesses.
Professor Gelernter also challenged the IT industry to make things easier and solve some of the most vexing information problems that frustrate users.
Amen. I could not agree more, but I see the solution at the other end of a Web browser, not in the PC. For example, IBM Research has been actively pursuing advances in Natural Language Processing over the last few decades. By pressing the boundaries of computational linguistics, knowledge-based and statistical models, speech processing, machine translation, automated question answering, interactive dialogue systems, and other advanced techniques, some breakthroughs are beginning to happen.
An example of one of the more interesting projects going on at IBM Research is PIQUANT (Practical Intelligent QUestion ANswering Technology). PIQUANT "facilitates the integration of independently produced knowledge sources, provides a uniform interface to accessing knowledge from these distinct sources, and enables employment of multiple answering agents that may employ vastly different strategies to answering questions". Let me translate that to English. Suppose you want to know who makes the best three-wheeled conversion of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. If you Google "who makes the best three-wheeled conversion of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle" you get 69 matches (in most examples it might be millions of matches). None of the matches contain the real answer. You might find what you are looking for by surfing a lot but you might not. The problem is that Google looks at the content of billions of web pages and ranks them based on the words in your query. Piquant figures out what your real question is. Through advanced syntactical analysis it concludes that "makes" means "who is the manufacturer of". It figures out that "three-wheeled conversion" means "trike". It would likely present Lehman Corporation in Canada as the answer to your question.
Innovation is alive and well. It is happening mostly at "the back end" where thousands of computer scientists at IBM and other software laboratories around the world are using massive grid computing networks to solve major problems of the world. Check out the The World Community Grid and you can participate. Although the PC will be the minority participant in the networked world, there are millions of them out there. Most of them are utilized a very small percentage of the time. Don’t throw any PC’s away — connect them to the World Community Grid, and let the spare computational capacity be deployed toward finding a cure for cancer and other diseases.

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