Apple’s unveiling of the Macintosh nearly a quarter century ago heralded a new era of computing.
The Mac was the first computer to use a graphical user interface and a mouse. It was the computer for the masses that didn’t want to bother with command line interfaces and balky hardware.
The computer was finally a completely self-contained package, and as an added benefit was an attractive piece of hardware, even when it wasn’t turned on.
Few can doubt that personal computing would have charted a different future without the Macintosh. Yet, as things turned out, within six years the Mac would see a steady decline in sales following the introduction of Windows 3.0 and the desire among computer users to work outside of the Mac’s confinements.
Where once consumers found the Mac’s turnkey simplicity reassuring, they now hungered for additional hardware which, quite literally, didn’t fit inside the box Apple provided. This luxury was standard on the competing IBM-compatible platform, allowing users to add their own hardware and software with ease.
As a trailblazer, the Macintosh was a milestone in the development of home computing, and by extension, the Internet. The Mac also earned a pedestal in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art for its design aesthetic. The sustaining elements of the computing revolution weren’t unique to Apple–the company merely made those elements more attractive.
Nearly a generation later, Apple is once again trying to create a totally controlled, self-contained environment–this time not for computers, but for music and entertainment. However, the market served with Apple’s iPod devices is far more digitally sophisticated than those early computer users. And today’s legions of tech-savvy music listeners are not likely to accept the company’s shackles for long.
Despite popular conception, Apple did not invent the digital portable music player. What Apple did was take a product that was slowly working itself into the hands of willing consumers and make it sexy. In addition to making the product attractive to consumers, Apple was able to sell the concept of portable digital music, just as it had with home computing decades earlier.
But even as consumers have purchased Apple’s devices in droves, they’ve come to realize that there’s more to digital music than what’s contained in the little white box. Other, arguably superior devices are now on the market; more are being introduced regularly. These players offer features that will become the sustaining elements of the digital entertainment revolution–they will be smart devices with IP connectivity and increased onboard storage.
We’re already beginning to see this paradigm shift. Consider the following industry changes, which have occurred in the last several years:
- Traditional audio manufacturers–Denon, Yamaha, Bose–are bringing to market equipment boasting super storage, connectivity and the ability to play multiple audio formats.
- TiVo and other set-tops are tapping their storage and processing abilities for more than time-shifting TV shows.
- All the major cell phone manufacturers have phones with increased storage, processing power, connectivity and use of different audio and video formats in their five-year design plans. This year alone we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of new music phones and a clear shift in the marketing to consumers.
The greatest objective for today’s music listeners–what they regard as their inalienable right–is absolute portability: music that can be accessed anywhere, at anytime. Today’s consumers want their music immediately available at home, in their car, at work, on their phones, at a party, or while working out at the gym, without the hassle of using multiple devices that are each tethered to different services.
In such an open-source world of unfettered digital entertainment, the device is a means, not an end, to set listeners free. Why then, in the long term, would anyone accept the limitations of the proprietary lockout of the iPod and iTunes? Once the digital revolution stabilizes, we’ll be left with a wide range of devices that can play music seamlessly. Everything from car dashboards and cell phones to stereo consoles at home or work will give us access to our entertainment.
In the not-so-distant future, Apple will again be acknowledged for introducing consumers to new technology and marketing the first truly successful line of digital music players–products that the masses lusted after, but eventually moved beyond.
The technological aesthetic created by Apple has earned it a rightful place in design history. However, a new generation of device makers and consumers is writing the next chapter in digital music history.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Apple, Hardware, Ideas, Software | 2 Comments »
For years, the Microsoft chairman has been a fiery advocate, inside the company and out, for the notion that computers should be controlled, not just by mouse and keyboard, but also by more natural means, such as voice, touch and digital ink.
But, as Gates prepares to shift to part-time work at Microsoft next year, his vision is still more common inside the company’s research labs than inside the typical home or office. Unbowed, Gates said he expects to keep plugging away as he takes on a new, more limited role at the company.
“Big screens, touch, ink, speech, that’s something that I think, along with cloud computing, is the next big change in how we think about software,” Gates told CNET News.com on Tuesday. (Cloud computing is the notion that many of the computing tasks handled by individual computers today will instead be tackled by servers in huge data centers connected over the Internet.) “Ray Ozzie is driving our cloud computing stuff…Some of the natural interface stuff, I think he and Steve (Ballmer) will ask me to sort of keep the energy and vision alive there.”
Gates continues to lobby hard inside Microsoft for investment in speech and handwriting recognition, though neither has been a huge financial success for Microsoft. The Tablet PC, a frequent staple of Gates’ Comdex keynote speeches in the 1990s, remains a fairly niche product. And though the ability to control PCs through voice is built into Vista, the feature has gotten scant attention, and the operating system itself has received less than enthusiastic support in its first year on the market.
Gurdeep Singh Pall, a Microsoft vice president, who has worked closely with Gates in the areas of unified communications, said that Gates has expressed frustration with how slowly speech recognition has found its way into the mainstream. Pall noted that the software maker has been investing in the technology since at least 1991.
“Bill is a very big believer in speech and the potential of speech as a natural way of interacting with machines,” Pall said. “That’s an area where he is very interested and wants to understand what are the limitations and how do we get past those limitations.”
A number of Gates’ pet projects have yet to make it into the mainstream. The digital watches that use Microsoft’s Smart Personal Object Technology have remained geek toys, and his dream of an all-new Windows file system based on SQL found itself on the cutting room floor when Longhorn became Vista. But other big bets, like Internet television and the Xbox, appear poised to start paying off after years of investment.
Gates said Microsoft has been right to invest in those areas, though he agrees his company has sometimes invested in ideas well before they were ready for prime time.
“As we take the magic of software to new things, it’s OK to be too early,” Gates said. “We don’t want to be in too late.”
And, as for these new means of interacting with computers, he insists they are underappreciated, not unimportant.
“All these things about natural interface are coming to the fore, and they are probably the thing that’s most underestimated right now about the digital revolution,” Gates said.
Of all the new ways of interacting with computers, the one that seems to be gaining the ground the quickest is multitouch, where people use multiple finger gestures to manipulate objects on a screen. Microsoft has the feature in its high-end tabletop computer, Surface, while Apple has introduced a more mainstream adaptation of the technology in the iPhone and iPod Touch
“People kind of gasp when they see how touch works on Surface, you know, when they touch their iPhone,” he said. “‘Oooo, wow,’ you know, that’s just such a natural thing.”
The conference table, the office whiteboard and even the bedroom mirror are all surfaces that will one day be replaced with an intelligent computer screen, Gates said.
“Give us a 5- to 10-year time frame and we will wonder why our tables used to sit there and not do anything for us,” Gates said.
Pall said that Gates’ strength is helping the company see where technology will help previously disparate things come together. “He is amazing at spotting what are the connections that need to be made, and then moving on to the next opportunity to make the connection, and letting the rest of Microsoft and the industry innovate once the proper connection has been made.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Ideas, Microsoft, Software | No Comments »
The creator of Second Life and technology stalwart IBM announced Wednesday they have joined forces to knock down walls separating virtual worlds on the Internet.
The US firms are using a Virtual Worlds Expo and Conference in San Jose, California, to promote enabling people’s animated online personae, referred to as “avatars,” to freely roam from one virtual world to another.
Currently, avatars are trapped in the virtual worlds in which they are created.
Since people routinely spend hours customizing online proxies with hairstyles, tattoos, wardrobes, skin tone and more, they are averse to repeating the processes in multiple virtual worlds.
This fact is thwarting the virtual life universe from reaching its potential as a place to socialize, advertise, do business and make money, according to San Francisco based Linden Lab, which created Second Life.
“You spend an enormous amount of time on your avatar’s appearances and the things it uses to interact and you want to take those with you,” Linden vice president of business affairs Ginsu Yoon told AFP.
“We don’t think the future of virtual worlds is going to involve a lot of siloed experiences competing against each other. The future is going to involve going from one world to another.”
Pioneering virtual world Second Life has approximately 10 million registered users, with nearly ten percent of those “residents” having logged into the virtual world in the past 30 days.
Other flourishing online worlds include Gaia, which is inhabited with avatars inspired by Japanese anime cartoon characters, and Entropia Universe founded in Sweden more than a decade ago.
IBM and Linden are crafting interoperability standards and protocols based on open-source software in the hopes they will result in open borders between virtual worlds.
IBM’s vision of the future of “three-dimensional Internet” includes companies using virtual worlds for tasks such as recruiting, meetings, and employee training.
“As the 3-D Internet becomes more integrated with the web, we see users demanding more from these environments and desiring virtual worlds that are fit for business,” said IBM digital convergence vice president Colin Parris.
Businesses have already followed people into virtual worlds; opening shops to promote brands and even sell items that are delivered to avatars’ counterparts in the real world.
Investors channeled more than a billion dollars (US) into “in-world” companies during the past year, according to virtual world conference organizers.
Virtual worlds will duplicate the explosive expansion of Internet websites that occurred in the 1990s if, as is the case browsing online, users are free to go whether they choose, Yoon predicts.
Gartner research firm predicts that by 2011, 80 percent of the people using the internet will have alter egos in virtual worlds.
“What we are really trying to do is lead an effort that others will want to join,” Yoon said. “None of this stuff is going to be enforced by the will of unreasoned dictate. I’m sure there will be the usual amounts of interest and skepticism mixed together.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Gaming, Ideas, Internet | No Comments »
