Daemon's Advocate

By Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>

Welcome Back

It's been a while since I've penned (well, pixelled would be more accurate) one of these columns. Dæmon News has received a fresh batch of editors who have livened up the web site, a new format has been adopted, and somebody is once again thrusting me up on this soapbox. While I'm here, I guess I might as well get a few things off my chest.

I've been "promoted" to a more research-oriented role at work, so I've been reading more extensively in the trade press and research articles recently. I still see a lot in the computer industry that dismays me, though I guess I should have learned better by now. It's one thing when the usual array of flacks and hacks completely miss the point when somebody is doing some important and cutting edge, but quite another when everyone, even those who normally "get it" miss the boat as well.

The current hullabaloo that is tripping my bogometer is the so-called battle for the desktop. I'm amazed and dismayed this is coming up again. That war was fought and won handily by Microsoft many years ago, for the best of reasons. They provided what the business community wanted, namely something that could run a word processor, and did it well enough to meet the needs of their customers. It doesn't matter that their solutions didn't meet my needs or standards, yours, or those of any other individual, they did meet the needs of enough business users to put tens of billions of dollars in the hands of Microsoft and effectively eliminate any competition for business desktop computers the world over.

So why are we seeing the battle of the desktop all over again? Other than socio-political ego, there is no reason. This is not to say that pushing Microsoft to support open documentation standards, and mandating that government documents be published in open formats, is a bad idea. In fact it is such an astonishlingly good idea I'm almost persuaded to call for capital punishment for bureaucrats who fail to understand and follow through on the necessity for open formats. Almost.

But as far as winning (or winning back) the desktop from Microsoft, why bother? Do we still think the desktop PC is the computing platform of the future? I certainly don't, and I don't particularly care who is left picking the bones off the corpse of the desktop computer market for the next 4 or 5 years, either. Admittedly, it's a really big corpse with a lot of meat left on the bones, but it's certainly not the future of computing, other than those poor slobs who spend their days chained to a desk being a "knowlege worker". Oh, wait, I'm one of those guys, aren't I? Never mind, the next wave of computing won't start on the business desktop but it will replace many aspects of it.

So if the desktop isn't the future of computing, what is? Truly personal computing, of course. In most cases the PC has remained true to its IBM heritage. Rather than truly being a personal tool, it is mostly the smart terminal of the 90s.

A quick look around the average home will show the explosion of computers I and other writers have been writing about for years. As I write this on my iBook, I'm sitting in my living room surrounded by personal computers. The Digital Video Recorder beside my television is a small computer with a big(gish) disk drive that records programs at my whim. The thermostat down the hall is another small computer. Above my head is a wall clock synchronized the US atomic time standard; a small computer with hands and a radio.

The problem with all these little computers is they don't really cooperate on my behalf. If I let the battery in the thermostat run down, I have to look at the clock on the wall to set the clock in the thermostat. The DVR sets its clock to the time provided by the cable TV company, but that doesn't always agree with the wall clock. Worse yet, the programs recorded on the DVR in the living can't be played on the TV in the bedroom or the computer screens in the den, even though the house is wired and unwired for networking.

All this ranting was inspired by a recent column on the Apple Matters web site. The topic, Apple to Split into Apple Computer & Apple Electronics seems to be a recurring them among Apple watchers; Rob Enderle seems to have been predicting (or demanding) this for a number of years.

Opposing this are new features in recent Mac computers, including the included remote control and the Front Row application. These applications point the direction Apple seems to be taking, where the "PC" joins the ranks of consumer electronics.

The PC is the TV?

Wow, what an idea. Instead of viewing the computer business and the entertainment electronics business as competing with each other, they're complimentary. Now that we finally have a video standard that works for both, why not? In many cases, the video display is the most expensive part of either the computer or the home entertainment system, especially if it is a large flat panel display.

So what does this have to do with open file formats? Everything! Regardless of what operating system, web browser, or other software runs on this entertainment system, the users are going to want to interact with the world using these systems. We see glimpses of this already, where VOIP phone systems have the ability to flash caller ID information on the TV screen, integrated mail boxes can forward voice mail as email attachments, etc. In this world of integrated digital bliss, who's going to want to drag out a PC just to fill out a tax form or renew their automobile registration? Certainly not me.

Microsoft has been attempting to win their place in your entertainment stack for quite a number of years now. Their sincere hope (and effort) seems to be centered on making their software, both application and operating system, the default in the new digital world. Fortunately so far they've been failing miserably, for all the best of reaons: their software is complicated, difficult to use, and impossible for the average person to install and configure. Underestimating Microsoft is rarely a good idea; they have very deep pockets and they appear to be ready to keep getting it wrong until everyone else drops by the wayside.

If Linux, Apple, or the rest of the world want to play in the software world of the future, trying to dominate the computing landscape of the 20th century is no longer a good start. I hope we'll continue to see BSD systems other than Apple play in this arena. Linux has a pretty large footprint in the first generation of digital video players like TiVO. The next generation will be a lot more intersting now that HDTV has fully arrived. As for the Apple rumors, I strongly prefer the one that has Apple buying TiVO to the splitting the company idea.