Non-PC
The future of computing is what the current issue of The Economist tackles. Its verdict: a computer in every pocket. In other words, the next big thing after the PC will be some kind of "smartphone". This puts the computer industry and the mobile phone industry on a collision course says the weekly and predicts the mother of all technology battles between Microsoftand Nokia. And the winner when the dust clears?
"The answer is that there is unlikely to be a single winner this time around. IBM ruled in mainframes because it owned the dominant hardware and software standards. In the PC era, hardware became an open standard (in the form of the IBM-compatible PC), and Microsoft held sway by virtue of its ownership of Windows, the dominant software standard. But the direction of both computing and communications, on the Internet and in mobile telecoms, is towards open standards: communication devices are less useful if they cannot all talk to each other. Makers of pocket communicators, smartphones and whatever else emerges will thus have to compete on design and branding, logistics, and their ability to innovate around such open standards."
Declaring a switch to mobile devices the next logical computing step, The Economist concludes:
"At the moment, these considerations seem to favour Nokia more than any other company. But Nokia faces a direct challenge as Microsoft leads the computer industry on to its turf; its continued dominance of the mobile-phone industry is by no means assured, since it is not based on the ownership of proprietary standards. Microsoft, for its part, will try to exploit its dominance of the PC industry to help force its way into the new market. But it may well fail."
By the way, the same idea was approached in a somewhat different fashion on Thursday in Salon. Farhad Manjoo, in a fine article called "Microsoft wants your cellphone", looked at how, Opera, the small Norwegian browser company, is faring against Redmond in the race to be the browser of choice with the mobile phone makers. If you thought that the browser wars were over and that Microsoft had won, think again says Manjoo. Opera is looking good, better, in fact, than Internet Explorer on small devices and it could have a viable future if (and this is a big "if") Microsoft is willing to let multiple operating systems bloom. Don't bet on that, though, Manjoo writes.
