Twilight Of The PC Era?

Even Mitch Kapor, whose Open Source Applications Foundation is built on the premise that today's high-priced software applications will one day be cheap or free, considers it absurd to imagine the end of big innovations. "Is our software so great now that it can't be radically improved?" he asks.

What are the emerging innovations? Some of them don't really sound earth-shattering, but they get CIOs excited: Web services that promise to speed the information flow through a company and eliminate delays in the supply chain. (We'll leave the details to CIO magazine.) One new technology promises to send shock waves through corporate America and eventually alter the lives of consumers: radio-frequency identification, or RFID. The ability to put very cheap sensors on products and track them from manufacture to the consumer--and eventually tag all items so people can keep track of their stuff--will cause a lot of changes. (Privacy advocates are already concerned about the ability of snoopers to look inside your shopping bags.) Wal-Mart, a company that's grown to monster size by embracing technology, is demanding that its suppliers adopt RFID. Developments like these confound Carr's "Follow, don't lead" advice. As Microsoft VP Jeff Raikes says, "Who would you rather be--Wal-Mart or Sears?"

Another compelling development is search technology--the success of Google shows that a business can be built on the ability to instantly locate information. As more and more data are warehoused in cheap storage devices, software to mine them will change not only the way businesses work, but the way we learn, archive and remember.

Microsoft itself has, as you might imagine, its own master plan to keep the good times rolling. Next month Bill Gates and his top tech gurus will present a new "core vision" for the company based on what he calls "seamless computing"--a holistic means of using technology that delivers "rich interfaces and new experiences" no matter where you are and what device you use. "It's all about the power of using advanced software to bring computers into your world, rather than forcing you into theirs," says Gates. The flagship for the seamless-computing effort is the next operating system, code-named Longhorn, due to arrive in 2006.

Carr and other proponents of the twilight era have performed a service in puncturing some of the starry-eyed and self-serving cant of industry insiders. But the smart people who buy technology know that sooner or later, something will come along that compels them to bust their budget. Chances are that at this very moment there's some unknown geek making a breakthrough that corporations everywhere will have to understand and utilize--or else choke in the dust of discarded motherboards. And then we'll know, beyond a doubt, how much IT matters.

© 2003