Ordinary Gweilo

What is a computer?  Why do we have "computers" when actually what many people need is one or more consumer devices (or "appliances") that do a fairly limited number of things (such as web surfing, playing games, watching movies, and word processing) as painlessly as possible, and without having to worry about viruses and upgrading operating systems and other assorted nonsense.

Well, maybe.  The thing about a computer is that people may feel they can justify buying because it can do so many things – see, it’s educational and we can use it for work as well, not just playing games and surfing the web.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that people have been known to use computers for doing naughty things such as downloading video and audio content.  No manufacturer of an "appliance" would get away with providing such functionality, but it’s a simple matter to run the programs under Windows or Linux or Mac OS on your computer.  Of course there are always clever people who can "enhance" so-called consumer devices to do things that were not intended, but that tends to invalidate warranties and can do even worse things.

Nevertheless, there should be a market for a cheap "appliance" that does a few things quite well.  Shouldn’t there?  Jack Schofield asks Is the £199 laptop a PC or an appliance?

The £199 laptop is about to hit the UK, in the form of the RM Asus MiniBook.

RM’s chief executive Tim Pearson [….] explained that RM’s business was increasingly about taking responsibility for the equipment used in schools. However, a typical secondary school runs about 250 applications, including specialist programs for music and video. If every child has a computer, this soon becomes impossible to handle: "The support lines just get too big."

But Pearson reckons that 90% of educational needs can be satisfied by an appliance such as the MiniBook, with its built-in web browser and office suite. "If you’ve got a fixed level of functionality, it doesn’t matter what the operating system is," he says. "How many of the people who have a BlackBerry know or care which OS it runs?"

This an interesting point.  Mobile phones have operating systems, and many of them include web browsers and email software.  Palm, Symbian, Microsoft, and others (now including Apple), are competing in a market that is more open than the one for desktops and laptops.  People generally buy phones for the features rather than the possibilites offered by the OS.  Maybe one day most computers will be the same.

Whether computer appliances will succeed now is anybody’s guess. JP Gownder of Forrester Research says that "in a world where many households own more than one PC, there’s more scope for specialised PCs. For example, a home theatre PC will look like a stereo component. This type of PC exists today, but more will come – PCs built for specific settings and unique consumer segments. Whether these will be stripped down to ‘appliances’ is debatable, but I do believe PCs will evolve beyond just ‘laptop and desktop’ into a much wider panoply of form factors."

Whether or not the devices are appliances, it seems likely that the support functions will be. To get to the next billion users, the industry can’t afford anything else.

The danger for Microsoft (and Intel) is that a large proportion of those next billion users will buy computers that are very different from what we use today.  On the other hand, they have seen off dozens of challengers, many of which look quite promising at the time, and may well continue to do so.