Analyst Opinion - I am at an annual conference Phoenix Technology puts on to discuss the future of the PC called Strategy 2009. This conference is relatively unique in the segment, because the general topics that are covered are less about products that exist and largely focused on what will exist about two to three years out. One of the wake up presentations was from one of HP’s CTOs, who showcased that the most powerful country in the world in 1900 was Great Britain and the most powerful country in the world is now becoming China, which will have the largest English speaking population shortly, and is already graduating students from colleges at 3x the speed of the U.S. (and, on this metric, India is a close second). Join me for some visions for the future PC landscape.
This was all part of a foundation piece that indicated change was coming at an ever increasing pace and that, by the time 2049 comes around and if current trends will continue, a laptop computer will have more computing power than the combined brains of the human race. Hopefully it won’t be part of Skynet. Let’s chat about some of the stuff that is exciting the folks here.
Open Source Hardware
Much like we saw a massive jump to Open Source software, there is now a ramping initiative to Open Source Hardware. This is actually more similar to the kind of effort that first created the PC than in anything specifically out of the software side. The cost associated with designing and building a complex computer is creating a substantial drag on innovation and companies who are building new components have started to create open reference designs which can be broadly adopted without cost in order to move the platforms forward and create markets for these new and currently homeless parts.
The promise is that we will see more innovative products more quickly; the problem is it isn’t the design that is the most expensive part of the problem. A lot of it is the cost of creating the prototypes, building out the lines and getting some retailer to sell the result. But the belief is it will lead to more common designs which can more easily shift between technologies and advance more quickly. We’ll see.
PC Application Store
This concept actually flushed out more quickly on smart phones than on PCs. The reason: The existing sales channel for phone applications is largely through the carriers anyway and not general retail. What was interesting is this that isn’t yet being thought of as an Application Store, but that was what was discussed. The products being initially pushed through it are, interestingly enough, largely from Phoenix and represent a set of offerings that generally had to be designed into a PC right now like instant on and PC LoJack. Phoenix calls them HyperSpace and FailSafe, but there will be many more applications that are enabled by a PC OEM to allow a PC owner to upgrade a PC much like Application Store users do every day with their iPhone, iPod Touch, and G1. Wrapped into an annual service charge, the result is a growing number of utilities, each one costing under $20, that are all guaranteed to actually work together.
Think in terms of a super suite of products that can be offered at low incremental cost and then tie you back to an annual fee which is split between the software provider and the OEM. Though eventually this split could include the retailer, or ,in the case of WWAN connected products, a carrier. It forecasts a time in which you may never again buy a software package in a store and get the same kind of support and reliability as a consumer that only the biggest and best run companies can provide to their users.
Read on the next page: Desktops without wires, cloud computing, security