At the risk of dating myself, there was a computer revolution that happened back in the early 80’s when I was just a child prodigy, a young buck if you will, when the old DEC (Digital Equipment Company) company began marketing their new "super-mini" computer called the VAX 8800. This was an affordable computer for small high-tech companies to buy versus the warehouse sized IBM behemoths that were reserved for companies the sized of, well, IBM.
It was a grand and glorious day when the six technicians arrived to deliver and set up our company’s new mini computer. They skillfully maneuvered the one thousand pound machine on dolly’s into its new climate controlled specially built room. The engineers were absolutely giddy about the prospect of accessing the awesome power this machine held. It ran at a blazing fast 22.22Mhz clock rate with 64KB of cache and up to 128 MB of main memory.
The pace of technology accelerated from there because about the same time IBM introduced their IBM XT personal computer. This revolution in computer technology caught the imaginations of a generation of programmers who brought office productivity software into reality with the first killer app: VisiCalc. This was quickly followed by Compaq’s "portable" computer that looked more like a sewing machine than a computer but you were able to at least take it on an airplane and haul it from one office to the next with a neat suitcase-like handle.
Fast forward a bit more and you had these newfangled "lap top" computers coming to market. These were ten pound slabs of plastic you could shove into your briefcase provided it was big enough and haul it through Heathrow stopping every five minutes to rest your arms and/or shoulder depending on whether you briefcase had a shoulder strap or not. It was unheard of back then to use a backpack as a briefcase.
The revolution slowed a bit and for the next decade or so. Innovation was all about improving performance and reducing power for the laptops while the desktop computers became more like mainframes and then migrated to gaming machines with multiple CPUs, huge hard drives and enough fans on the back to cool a Formula One race car and almost as loud too.
Innovation picked back up with improvements in CPU performance, advancement in battery technology, and reductions in power consumption allowing a laptop to last about 5+ hours; just enough to get you from San Francisco to New York City.
And now, here we are again; right in the middle of another revolution every bit as transformative as the introduction of the first "mini" computers and PCs. Major changes are taking place right before our eyes at light speed with the advancements in mobile technology including smartphones and the newer tablets.
Smartphones today are sporting 1Ghz processors with 32GB of storage. These devices have orders of magnitude more processing power and program storage then the old DEC VAX minis and a thousand times more bandwidth. The whole smartphone platform is being reinvented every 18 months with more and more powerful processors and memory subsystems to handle the expected bandwidth that will be required in a few short years.
And enter the tablets. These devices will, again, change how and where we work, play, and socialize. One’s whole life will be integrated with a tablet. Much like how the cell phone became an appendage of the human body. The tablet will be your window into the world around you; for you to see out and others to see in.
These new hardware devices have spawned a whole new industry of building applications, or apps as there are called, that can do just about everything. There is, indeed, an app for that. The Apple Apps Store has recorded over ten billion downloads since it opened in July of 2008 with over 400,000 available apps. The number of Android apps is growing at an astounding rate as well; about 3.3 billion apps have been downloaded from about 145,000 apps in little over a year. Microsoft was late to the party but will keep throwing money at the mobile space so they should not be counted out with their Windows 7 Phone OS. They will certainly be a player but it’s not clear how big of a player.
At the end of the day, it will be the software/apps that will make or break a mobile device and not, necessarily, some unique hardware feature because if the consumer that feature, every manufacturer will find a way to provide it. It happened with touch screens.
A huge shakeout is looming for the tablet suppliers. It is going to be very tough to compete against the likes of Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy. There were hundreds of tablets offerings at the recent CES from a variety of well-known and not so well-known companies. Most won’t make it in the market place. There is one thing that tablet suppliers need to understand, however, and that is pricing. If they want market penetration like the ubiquitous feature phone, they’ll need to offer high-functionality tablets at about a third of where they are priced today. Apple may be in a unique position because they have never been the price leader on anything. But, certainly the rest of the field will need to consider a price that will fuel the market beyond the early adopters and gadget freaks.
In a little over a week the biggest mobile tradeshow and convention, GSMA, will be held in Barcelona. It’s going to be interesting to see what new entries to this current revolution will be introduced, especially after all the new gadgets introduced at CES only a month ago.
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