Web Work in a Post-PC World
If you were paying attention last week, you may have seen the story go by: PC sales in Japan have declined for five straight quarters now. Apparently the traditional beige box just doesn’t cut it for the younger generation, who can do everything they need to do on mobile phones, big-screen TVs, and game consoles. Though some of us may be unable to imagine life without a personal computer, it’s worth remembering that such things have only been a part of our lives for 25 years now.
But surely web workers will continue to require a computer, whether desktop, laptop, or palmtop, for the foreseeable future, to do our jobs. Or will we? With a little effort it’s possible to imagine a mobile world just around the corner in which working on the web doesn’t require anything that we recognize as a personal computer at all.
What, after all, does a web worker need? There are three basics, I think: a way to connect to the internet, a way to view existing information, and a way to input new information. Now, obviously, you can get this today with any number of smart phone devices, but I don’t quite see those as viable web work devices. Windows Mobile and iPhones and their ilk may be sleek and sexy, but limited bandwidth, tiny screens, and clunky input methods make them dubious as primary electronic homes for the serious web worker.
But the pieces are here, or nearly here, to improve matters. EVDO and WiMAX are making high-speed mobile access a reality in more and more places. Head-mounted displays can give you more pixels for portable devices. I’m not aware of any phones designed to use HMDs yet, but perhaps some niche manufacturer can build something using Google’s new “Android” platform. Input is more problematic, but speech recognition has been making major strides in recent years.
Whether you call it a souped-up phone or a super-PDA or a wearable computer, it seems to me that it should be possible for a dedicated web worker to cut the tie to the traditional PC entirely within the next one to two years. The other piece of the picture, of course, would be to rely heavily on online applications; we’ve reviewed dozens of them here, and there are plenty more out there, so that doesn’t seem like an impossible hurdle either.
There’s one final question: motivation. Are people who work on the web really interested in the extra mobility boost that disposing of their PCs would get them, even at an additional hardware cost and the hassles of being on the cutting edge of software? Would you do it? I’m betting the time will come when we look on our PC-tethered brethren as dinosaurs, but you can use the comments to tell me that I’m all wet if you want.
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I think devices such as the iPhone will soon be full-featured enough to be a full-fledged work device, provided that one can easily interface them with comfortable human input/output devices. As you point out, with Wi-Fi and eventually WiMAX, EVDO, and HSPA, Broadband connectivity to the Internet is / will be included. Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware) there isn’t yet a universal wireless interface for displays, but wireless USB is coming soon, and Bluetooth is here now and will work with keyboards and mice. I don’t think that the iPhone yet supports Bluetooth keyboards or mouse, but that’s likely just a matter of time, and perhaps Apple will settle the wireless display interface issue also. Add some way for the iPhone to access a USB Flash Drive (perhaps via a Wi-Fi hub that has a USB port), and at that point the iPhone is a (good enough for me) work computer.
Even if I weren’t tethered to the office by technology, I would still like being in my office (at least most of the time). I don’t really want to be wandering about – I want to concentrate on my work. That requires a dedicated space, where I have complete control over distractions (obsessive checking of Google analytics notwithstanding), temperature, noise, etc. I need the physical space in order to get grounded on whatever intellectual task I’m trying to accomplish.
Other web workers that I know can’t concentrate without the low-level din of a barrista shouting coffee orders.
The biggest boon to web workers about having untethered options, I think, is that we now get to match our technnology tools to our unique personalities and workstyles.
ROFLMAO — Not at you Mike, for all that I know on the subject you could be, as we like to say around here SpotOn! The reason that I am laughing is that I can see it now… everyone with a Pumpkin Spice Latte, No whip and a HMD to go along with that low fat Starbucks muffin!!!
You never know…
It depends on the job. The laptop did not displace the desktop computer for many workers. Small screens didn’t lead to a decline in multi-headed computers with vast screen real estate. There are simply a range of jobs that require a lot of sit-down-and-analyze-and-edit tasks, whether its programming, finance, architecture, editing, publishing, mapping, or other “white collar” and “pink collar” jobs.
It won’t make sense for the sales force to haul around laptops when they have mobile phones with good screens. It won’t make sense for most “normal” (read, non-analytical) people to get a desktop or even laptop computer, when they’re going to use it for word processing and web surfing.
There are plenty of people who will delight in not being forced into the computer mold, because they don’t need a computer. But there are also a lot of people who use the computer for something besides playing music and videos, and chatting with friends. They want a computer for computer things, and want the computer to be even more computer-like, if possible. They want more disk, to index more data, to have more, large databases available to them instantly. They want more screen real estate, faster pipes, and more CPUs, so that the computer can keep up with their information requirements.
And, these people will be getting the computers, because there are so many more small non-computer-like computers out there.