T. Gilling
Aug 23, 2017 · 1 min read

It strikes me that when a technology reaches its peak, real innovation in that technology subsides and what you get instead is foamy, noisy, and largely pointless technological churn. Little things are changed, like size, portability, colour, construction materials, waterproofing, etc, but the underlying technology is essentially unchanged, it just a has a new coat of paint, so to speak. Desktop PCs reached their peak long ago, they were revitalised in the form of the smart-phone, which is nothing more than a very small, portable, PC. We think we are ‘moving forward’ when a smart-phone is able to do something that only a desktop PC previously could, like content creation, but this is not progress this is simply technological churn. It is a sign that we have run out of ideas (like rebooting Spiderman every few years). Do not get me wrong, turning a smart-phone into a desktop PC is very clever and it might even fill a useful niche but it is not real, true, write-it-in-capital-letters, PROGRESS. What we need is a fundamentally different approach to personal computing, one that can bring real benefit to the world. I believe that we have all the ingredients to create such an approach, we have the Internet, we have cloud computing, we have the ability to create sensor-rich portable electronic devices, we have real-time communications protocols, and soon we will have next-generation communications. Let us do something more with these technologies than turn a smart-phone into a desktop PC.

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T. Gilling

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…is a forward-looking information technologist and the author of The STREAM TONE: The Future of Personal Computing? (www.TheStreamTone.com)