As history has taught us time and again, nothing is permanent, and no company or product is too big to fade away when its time has passed. Even monopolies which manage to fend off competitors in their own fields can’t stand up when the entire industry shifts and makes them obsolete. Microsoft, for instance, has enjoyed near complete domination of the desktop operating system market, and has remained more popular than its alternatives for decades, but is suddenly facing the heat now that people are shifting to mobile phones and tablets as their primary devices. Nokia ruled over the high-end phone market till touchscreen smartphones took over, and even Intel, riding high with record-breaking benchmark performance figures, is suddenly interested in the low-power smartphone and tablet arena. At least they aren't pretending they're untouchable, like others before them have tried to do.
People are gravitating away from the PCs we’re used to seeing, and towards a new generation of devices and appliances that run the programs they need and access all the same information off the Web. For a large number of people—those who don’t have to use standardized office applications or work with specialized peripherals—the PC might already be irrelevant. A few years ago it seemed that netbooks would redefine computing, but it turns out that they were the result of manufacturers understanding only half the problem: netbooks fixed the problem of bulkiness, but were still tied down to legacy thinking of what hardware, operating systems and usage models should be like. Today, outside of the work environment, a tablet that lets you check email, surf the Web, make video calls and play games is a much better solution because it represents a total rethink of the overall experience. Both Android and iOS, the current major players, are designed with a new type of user and usage in mind. They’re so satisfying to use that even those who still require PCs for their full-featured capabilities will wind up owning a tablet or other device that they’ll use alongside for casual surfing and entertainment. Have tablets alone solved the problem or changed the world? Probably not; there are still major limitations, most importantly typing comfort. But we’re getting there, and we’re realizing how easy it would be to leave the PC behind.
We’re also witnessing a brand new wave of thinking when it comes to designing software and even websites. Things a developer could take for granted, such as a roughly standard screen size and vast amounts of storage space, no longer strictly apply. On the other hand, there’s suddenly a wealth of new input and output hardware to tap into, such as touchscreens, tilt sensors, accelerometers, compasses, GPS receivers and cameras. These devices are held differently and even that affects how we interact with them.
Even the pace of advancement has changed. New hardware and software is being developed so fast that a one-year gap between major releases is considered a long time. There’s a huge difference in the capabilities of this year’s flagship phones as compared to last year’s, and the hints we have about what's coming next make life in 2011 all the more exciting. It's all adding up, and the age we're living in now will change not just "computing", but the whole human equation with technology.
