Personal computers will retain their position as the center-point of household devices, despite growing popularity of digital appliances, an industry watcher said yesterday.
"There's no post-PC era," said Michael Gold, a senior researcher at Stanford University spin-off SRI Consulting Business Intelligence. "People who adopt new technologies have a PC. They will not throw away their PCs, except to buy a new one."
Gold was speaking at a research seminar in Taipei yesterday.
The figures speak for themselves, Gold said. There are 500 million computers in use worldwide according to US-based International Telecommunication Union figures, and International Data Corp predicted last month that the computer market will grow by another 134 million this year. Portable laptop computers topped only 25 million units last year, and personal digital assistants a meager 14 million units in the same period.
The bottomline is that people at the forefront of technology still rely on their big-box computers. The computer will develop into the hub for a network of appliances in the home, including air-conditioners, refrigerators, digital televisions with built-in DVD recorders, home stereo systems and game consoles.
Wireless transmitters will allow users to access the computer from anywhere in the home using different interfaces. The devices will link up wireless flat-screen tablet devices and television screens. The network will be accessible outside the home via a mobile phone.
Gold's vision of the future includes turning on the air-conditioning and outside lights with a mobile-phone call from the car, or listening to music on the car stereo downloaded from home using a wireless link. The phrase "couch potato" may take on a new meaning when, from the comfort of an easy chair, users can browse the Internet on a tablet PC via a fast broadband connection, communicating with friends in short messages that appear in the corner of the screen, while previewing the evening's entertainment from a digital TV program list.
Many of these techologies are available now, but are not expected to be the standard for five years, Gold said.
One modern day device that may be on its way out is the traditional keyboard.
"People are now used to the 12-key phone pad to write short messages, so maybe we don't need to care about using a [standard] keyboard in the future," Gold said.
Microsoft Corp, among other companies, has developed speech and handwriting-recognition technology so that users do not need to use keyboards, but the home may not be suitable for speech recognition because of interference from the television and other devices, Gold said.
Gold spoke yesterday at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei to present his vision of the home of the future at the Digital Future seminar, organized by Taiwan's privately-funded Topology Research Institute (拓墣科技研究所).
Founded by Stanford University in 1946, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was spun off as an independent company in the 1970s. SRI International employs 1,000 researchers at laboratories in California. SRI Consulting Business Intelligence is the company's consulting arm. The institute claims to have invented the computer mouse, the Internet -- in cooperation with the US Department of Defense -- and the thin-film transistor liquid-crystal display at one of its subsidiary labs.
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