The End of the Desktop?

According to ZD-Net UK, Bob Sutor of IBM asked, "What's a desktop?" His premise is that the future is cloud computing, many small devices running Linux allowing mobile collaboration. "Stop copying 2001 Windows...", says Sutor. Google, according to Wired magazine, likewise see cell phones as the future of computing: that is, that more people will do web searches on their phones than on their desktop computers.

Is this proposition true, that the future of the Internet is in the hands of over-connected gadget junkies? In the July 18 "Millennium Generation" animation on Dilbert.com, a gadget junkie announces that his advanced knowledge of virtual social networking and high connectivity will allow him to conquer the world, but Dilbert throws him in the trash can because of his lack of upper-body strength. Perhaps something similar is going on here.

I'm an anti-gadget person. Although I'm a programmer, I don't like having my thoughts interrupted by phone calls from managers, have no desire to expose my life savings to attack through Internet banking and live in fear of the day that I could buy web-enabled pants that will crash because of a denial-of-service (DOS) attack. Of course, I'm not alone. Most experts agree that people don't understand the value of their personal information and security (Lone Coder) and still more are suffering burn-out from a society where people are overwhelmed by email, voice mail and demands for quick decisions.

Quick decisions result in short-term thinking, those spot decisions made without weighing the consequences of the choices. In university, one of my professors wrote a series of papers looking spot choices and immediate gratification from a math perspective. When tasks are simple and unconstrained, grabbing at the most obvious solution is usually the best solution. However, in complex tasks, obvious solution is usually not the best. In complicated problems where there are many constraints or conflicting goals, each choice a person makes limits the next choice. The only way to make the best choice is to use techniques like linear programming to determine the best value by looking ahead and thoroughly examining all possible choices.

Of course, some people ricochet in the opposite direction and decide that, if quick decisions by knowledgeable people aren't good enough, then slow decisions made by a committee guarantees a good solution. This is the approach used by some software architecture standards such as TOGAF (TOGAF Home Page, Wikipedia). This assumes that a sequence good "pinhole" decisions will lead to an overall optimal solution. Of course, this is the problem of short-term thinking again. And it assumes all the committee people are making quality decisions with accurate data, no bias and that concensus guarantees a good solution--all of which are usually not true. When too many cooks spoil the broth, software committee decisions often result in lowest-common denominator solutions rather than optimal solutions.

So in business with high demand for quick decisions, the decision maker seldom has time to think clearly about the problem. There is great pressure for the person to be more connected and make more and more decisions quickly. The more connected a person is, the more their decision-making is fragmented by interruptions, leading to even worse decisions. "Just a quick question..." has become a mantra in many organizations.

This process is especially noticeable in management. In past decades, a manager would manage, perhaps, six to eight people and was expected to spend a lot of time with those people. Such managers understood the needs, strengths and weaknesses of those people and could avert developing problems before they became full-blown catastrophes. In this era of humans as resources and hyper-connectivity, managers are expected to oversee ten times the number of people with the same effectiveness which is not humanly possible.

Or take email as another example. Email should be an effective connectivity tool: it queues requests for people's time and ensures requests do not become lost. But blanket use of carbon copies and non-descriptive subjects require people to dig through email to sort for relevance because the senders don't have time to write appropriate emails personalized for each member of their audience. And "new mail" alerts, from a buzzing gadget or a pop-up on the screen, defeat email's effectiveness as a queuing tool. It's no wonder that the average worker spends more than two hours of every workday dealing with email, spends less than 10 seconds reading each one, and a third of those constantly checking a tool that's supposed to schedule requests for time. (Google Answers). This, again, results in fragmented and short-term thinking.

No matter how smart a person is, they can only be as smart as one person. A person cannot do the work of more than one person, even with technology. People may be thinking faster but they aren't thinking smarter.

There are many reasons to believe computing gadgets will becoming increasingly popular. Besides business pressures, there's also the simple human desire to have peer recognition and feeling needed and to get those desires met with the speed of technology. But the idea that these gadgets are beneficial, or even that they will bring productivity and value to a business, to make the desktop computer obsolete, seems to me to be far-fetched media hype to sell more low-cost computer accessories.

Indeed, even the apps themselves that are available on such devices are, by the nature of networking computing, underpowered or lacking features. ("Flash, HTML, Ajax vie for victory in web-app war", ZD Net UK).

Predictions of the pervasiveness of electronic gadgets has been around for many years. Author Issac Asimov was once asked to comment about electronic novels. Asimov pointed out that the device used to read the novel should have low power consumption, be easy to handle, easy to read, have good durability and shouldn't cost a lot. Then Asimov observed that such a device already exists: the book.

It is possible that being able to search for the nearest McDonalds on your cell phone is the future of Google, but I doubt Suton's assertion that cloud computing will spell the end of desktop computing. Yesterday Rogers emailed me to announce that, as a special customer, I could replace my old plastic gadgetty cell phone with a new plastic gadgetty cell phone with new games, better picture taking and music. I'm still waiting for a cell phone that makes decent phone calls with decent coverage for a decent price.

Meanwhile, this week I watched three people crowded around a Blackberry screen to try to decipher a tiny screenshot of an error. And a developer was showing off his iPhone, waving it in the air making Star Wars lightsaber sounds. This is what will replace the desktop? It seems unlikely--at least, for the near future.

August 15, 2008