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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