For its CeBIT trade show press conference this month, Microsoft said it had scheduled 30 seconds for its Ultra Mobile PC announcement, known as Origami. The company didn’t know that Digital Kitchen had left an old concept video online, nor that bloggers would find it. The result was that the project attracted far more hype than intended — and, naturally, failed to live up to it.
The problem is that we don’t really know how important Origami will be. It could fulfil the dreams of three decades of computer geeks, and turn into the Dynabook, the futuristic personal computer that Xerox Parc’s Alan Kay described in 1976 (http://tinyurl.com/lcvny — a 9.7MB PDF).
Or it could just be a niche-filling exercise: a small area between smart phones and Tablet and notebook PCs on the chart that, in the early 1990s, Microsoft used to call Windows Everywhere. Indeed, that’s where it is today, except the chart is now headed Microsoft Mobility Solutions.
The simple part of the problem is imagining the computer technology of the future. The IT industry has adopted Moore’s Law, modified to suggest that the price/performance of computers roughly doubles every 18 months (though this is not what Intel co-founder Gordon Moore said; see http://tinyurl.com/p785b). It is therefore possible to project what sort of hardware will be affordable in five or 10 years, and to develop software for it. I’ve heard Microsoft refer to this as its ”intercept strategy”.
It’s obvious that today it isn’t possible to create a Dynabook, or an Origami-style mini-Tablet PC with adequate performance at a mass market price. But with Intel and other chip manufacturers working hard to deliver more performance while consuming less power, that should be possible within a decade.
This means developing a standard hardware platform, not just the software. Mass market PC prices come from the mass production of interchangeable parts such as chips, screens, batteries, ports etc. It’s the competition between parts suppliers that helps drive down prices.
And this doesn’t just benefit Intel and Microsoft: it opens the door to everybody. Today, Origami hardware is using processors from Intel and Via Technologies, but it could use AMD and Transmeta chips in the future. Although the first Origami machines run Windows XP and the next lot runs Vista, the same hardware could run Linux or Mac OS. This should make it easier for Wintel rivals to develop competing products than if they had to start from scratch.
The much more difficult question is whether we’re actually heading in the right direction.
One of the great events in the history of computing came in 1963, when Ivan Sutherland, an MIT student, presented his PhD thesis on Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical Communications System. Sutherland showed how you could interact with a computer using its monitor and a light-pen. His demo was so compelling that it not only created the computer graphics industry, but also made such direct interaction a dream for the rest of IT. Operating a computer should be as easy as writing in a notebook. Except it would be a dynamic book….
This idea started to come to life two decades later, when Jerry Kaplan was convinced that the next generation of computers should work like notebooks. In 1987, he set up Go Corporation to develop tablet PCs running the PenPoint operating system (http://tinyurl.com/pgr3h), and this stimulated the production of numerous alternatives from Amstrad’s Pen Pad to Apple’s Newton MessagePad to IBM’s ThinkPad.
However, apart from a brief flourish from Palm in the late 90s, pen-based computing has failed to take off. Tablets have been successful in industrial and commercial applications, in health care, the transport industries, field services and so on. It would be great if the Origami project led to millions of people finally getting the sort of computer they can use.
But what if the Dynabook is a chimera that people don’t really want? After all, far from adopting pens, most ordinary people seem happier typing with their thumbs on barely adequate keyboards. And who predicted that? – Guardian Unlimited Â