IBM’s PC turns 20 this weekend. It blows my mind at how far they’ve come in such as short time. So what does everyone think the future holds in store for the PC? Will they make way for the Palm which is more portable and easier to store/hide?
Will we ever see another 180 in the computer industry much like the mainframes vs. PC’s?
What do you guys think?
Miniaturization. Wearable computers. There’ll be plenty of 180s.
About the best speculation I’ve been reading is by Andrew Odlyzko from AT&T Research Labs. I’m trying to locate one of his papers, it’s especially interesting, he says people overestimate the short term impact of new technologies, but underestimate the long term. I’m still hunting for that paper, but in the meantime here’s a couple other interesting ones.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/
http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/apr01/reviews.asp
He talks about the myths of accellerated progress on “Internet Time” being somewhat of a myth, some products take off like wildfire but some major technologies won’t show their true impact for decades. I guess time will tell.