Charting New Terrain

If the quirky machines that surround you are causing you grief, imagine the mess you'll be in when there are 10 times as many of these creatures biting at you in the next few years. That's where we are headed with the huge variety of new devices coming our way. Let's not be passive victims. Let's grab "progress" by the throat and redirect it so it serves us. If we don't deliberately do so, starting now, tomorrow's much larger menagerie of hardware and software systems will make our lives even more servile and complicated.

To achieve human-centric computing, we must pay attention to both the human and the computer side of the relationship. We begin with the raw material we have to work with - the computing terrain. We must understand how it is shaped and think ahead about how it will change, because technology constantly evolves.

By 2015, single-processor PCs will level out at around 50 times the speed of Year 2000 machines, because of fundamental limits on the smallest circuits that can be "printed" on a chip. To get greater performance, designers will harness microprocessors together, like horses on a cart, up to a thousand or so, before the tiny machines get in each other's way. These combined moves will make future machines tens of thousands of times faster. During the same period, the average communication speed between machines on the Internet will increase a few hundred times, using today's pipes - mostly telephone lines and television's co-axial cable. The number of people who use wireless communications will grow dramatically, but communication speed will remain well below that of future wire line phones and coax cables. The speed of communication among stationary machines will get another thousandfold boost when sometime in the next two decades the trillion-dollar plunge is taken, as it inevitably will be, by telephone, cable TV, and other companies to thread every home and office in the industrial world with glass fiber lines. Ultimately, these high-speed terrestrial links will interconnect a huge number of antennas that will define increasingly smaller wireless communication speeds over the Internet will eventually become ten thousand times faster than what they are today. Storage capacity on computers will keep up with this maniacal pace and costs will continue to drop from the Year 2000 level of $15 for a gigabyte (the equivalent of 500 paperbacks) to well below $1.

"Who needs all these gigas of power, speed, and storage?" you may ask. You do! But you don't know it, because the numbers measure what machines do, rather than what people care about. You want to know: "How quickly can tomorrow's system locate and ship to me a replacement part for my bathroom fixture? How well can I collaborate on producing a manual for my company's new product with a coworker who lives eight time zones away? Can I tell the computer to book me a flight to Israel, and have it carry out all the negotiations?"

A human-centric computer that can perform these functions quickly and effectively with minimal instruction from you will have to be simpler to use on the outside, which means it will have to become more complex on the inside - hence the need for all the gigas. But like a car, even though its inner workings will be complicated and powerful, all you should need to use it fully is the equivalent of a simple gas pedal, brake, and steering wheel. This ascent toward true human utiltiy will take time, but we can accelerate the process if we are not lulled by the siren song of the gigas. Starting now, we must judge computers' performance by how well they satisfy our needs, not by how fast they spin their wheels.

While the "horsepower" of computers and communications will increase remarkably, three shifts in the new terrain will drive even greater change: interconnection of a growing number of appliances and physical devices to our computers; an increasing use of mobile computers connected through wireless communications; and a new breed of highly mobile software.

For the half century of their existence, essentially all the machines we have used have been operated by us. This is about to change in a big way. Run-of-the-mill appliances will become first-class computers citizens. Microprocessors with the ability to communicate with our computers throughout a house, an office building, or across the Internet will be embedded in lots of physical objects we care about. These interconnected appliances will weigh us as we stand in the bathroom in the morning, prepare most of our breakfast and have it ready just as we enter the kitchen (while also ordering foodstuffs that are depleted); deliver, as we eat, an urgent memo we have been anxiously awaiting and return our spoken reply; open the garage and lower the house temperature as we leave for the office; and announce, as we exit the driveway, a special morning program we were expecting and can now listen to while commuting directions are displayed on our windshield for avoiding the latest traffic jams. The processors will control the physical appliances tirelessly, 24 hours a day, while giving us instant access to them and the information on all our personal systems, and on the Web, when we want it, wherever we are, and on whatever device happens to be handy.

Putting microcomputers in physical devices isn't new. What's new is the promise that these physical appliances will be harnessed by tomorrow's computers to serve your needs. Many languages and systems are already being developed to help appliances communicate with computers. Unfortunately, they are following the patterns of today's computer and communication systems: They work, but they are complex and hard to use.

Interconnecting appliances to our computers is driven by a fundamental, natural force: Every day you interact with all sorts of physical things to achiever your purposes. Computerizing some of these exchanges so they become easier, faster, mre reliable, and automatic will greatly enhance your ability to do more by doing less. This means that the number of these computerized appliances will far exceed the number of PCs. It also means that we we'll computerize only those appliances whose utility justifies their interconnection "cost" - not everything in sight, as the hype suggests. If your main goal is to feed your family, you won't buy shoes with embedded chips. And even if you are rich, you may elect to sink your hands in your garden dirt, rather than use your computerized soil sensor.

The second big change in the new terrain is growth of wireless mobility. Tomorrow's computers, phones, and many other devices will be able to communicate easily without wires - be it across the room to control your entertainment center, across town to check on your house's security, or across a continent to help you reach an associate. By 2003 cellular phones, many with Internet access capability, will exceed in number of PCs. The desire for wireless mobility is huge, for it stems from a powerful, natural force: People move. If machines can help us reach the humans and things we care about, wherever we and they may be, we can do even more by doing less. This change has already begun with laptops, PDAs, and cellular phones. But the rapidly advancing wireless terrain will extend it further, with the result that roving humans will get incresingly closer to the computer and communication power they now have at their desk.

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The third big change in the computing terrain will be in software. The devices we'll carry as we move will require software that can provide us with a "continuity" of services, regardless of which device we use. This will cause the software to become detached from specific devices and flow among them, carrying the functions we need, where and when we need them. For example, information about your health diet, and caloric intake isn't nearly as useful on your office PC as it would be on your kitchen table's info outlet, or on your PDA when you're in a restaurant 5000 miles from home and the creme brulee appears on the dessert trolley. And when your daughter, sitting next to you in the kitchen, is dying to find out if she has an e-mail message from her boyfriend, she should be able to do so on the same device you used a second earlier to consult your diet plan.

This notion of dressing different machines with the information you want, where and when you want it, will be a widespread feature of tomorrow's human-centric systems and will result in a lot of software transfers among them. Think of the software as capturing your information personality and becoming nomadic, so it can roam onto whatever device you want to use.

Applications software - from word-processors to Web browsers - and the way it is distributed will also change, due to economic reasons, but not the ones we have been hearing about. For years, people have been saying that the low marginal cost of copying software would drive itsprice to zero. This hasn't happened because software makers have been changing their products annually, mostly to keep making money through new features. This trend, and the growing ease with which nomadic software will move over the Net, will cause us to gradually stop buying the familiar shrink-wrapped software packages. Instead, we will "rent" the programs we need by having them periodically downloaded from the Net for a fee. The result of these trends is inevitable: The entire software enterprise will evolve from a product business to a service business. You'll pay a monthly fee to your software service provider, who will ensure that your software needs will be met, often automatically without your being aware of the upgrade .... as long as you keep up with the payments. And software revenues, instead of going down, will become steady and even rise.

The ease of moving software through networks, by the way, has motivated some manufacturers to hail the arrival of so-called network computers, anew breed of inexpensive boxes largely devoid of programs and bells and whistles that are targeted to replace PCs. You will fill them with software retrieved on the fly from the Net. This is a laudable dream that appeals to organizations that like to manage their software centrally. But in practice, tomorrow's machines will be neither pure network machines that acquire their functions online, nor pure PCs stuffed with software from the factory. They will use a mix of local and distant resources through flowing, nomadic software, because that will best serve people's needs.



Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos