Decius wrote:
] It's silly.
]
] Everything this person asks for is software, which has
] nothing at all to do with selling PCs (and a lot of what
] this person asks for is incredibly naive).

I think David Gelernter knows these things. I suppose he was trying to do the Vision thing. He is a computer scientist more than an engineer. As engineers we can't get past the details.

] There is little room for innovation in the PC market.

The very fact that this view prevails suggests that it is wrong.

You've attacked his examples without responding to his thesis, which is that televisions, airplanes, automobiles, and PCs "all were (or are) destined to take a lot longer than 25 years to reach maturity."

Your humbug statement becomes nothing more than a truism when you confine yourself to today's definition of "PC" and "PC market."

If you view the PC as an ecosystem, then hardware and software are much more closely intertwined than you've accepted. The primary data input device is based on the mechanical typewriter -- still! And while my IntelliMouse is now "optical" under the hood, it's still basically the same as Engelbart's original. Given this staid hardware landscape, it comes as no surprise that user interfaces are stagnant and 3D visual metaphors have not caught on.

The widespread availability of new hardware makes new kinds of software possible. What if I could sell a "value" desktop PC with 10 TB of disk space? What if I coupled it with unlimited online storage and a free, automatic, encrypted backup service? Ultimately, file system design is constrained by the block-structured nature of the hard disk drive.

] in their history they have tried several times to innovate
] in this market and they have failed consistently,
] because this market is about standardization and innovation
] makes you incompatible.

I really encourage everyone to read "Design Rules." (It has long been memed here.) You are definitely short-changing IBM on this.

Standardization of the computer was IBM's innovation. You owe the PC world as it exists today to IBM.

] The competitive markets in the PC world are media PCs, which
] will most likely be dominated by consumer electronics firms ...

These distinctions are arbitrary and American. The Chinese will not respect them. And they will win.

RE: How to Build a Better PC, by David Gelernter