The Golden Age of Laptops

In 1994, John Dvorak made numerous predictions in his book "Dvorak Predicts". Many of these turned out to be wrong, including "death of the mainframe", "OS/2 over Windows", and interestingly "death of the desktop". In the spirit of predictions, I have one of my own: the golden age of laptops is over, and with it goes the golden age of Windows.

I like laptop computers. (My opinion of Windows is somewhat different.) I've been using them since the early 1980s, starting with the NEC-8201A laptop that ran BASIC. (The NEC is quite similar to the TRS-80 model 100.) I've seen the early laptops run DOS on a single floppy disk, I've watched the technology grow to allow for hard drives and CD-ROM drives. Screens have improved from the original non-backlit, low-resolution LCD panels to today's photo-quality displays. Networking has been added, first with wires and later without. Laptop computers extended our ability to work untethered. They are a success.

But laptops have reached their peak. Compared to smart phones and e-book readers, laptops are large, expensive, and complicated. Laptops are taking a second seat to their smaller, more convenient brethren.

I expect that laptops will remain with us, especially for corporate users. We still have desktops; heck, we still have mainframes. We will see modest improvements: longer battery life, better screens, lighter and thinner units. But I expect no great leaps forward. Laptops have gotten about as good as they need to be.

The market is moving to a newer breed of device, or perhaps a set of breeds. The smart phones and e-readers are moving to the lead.

Here's the interesting thing about the new devices: they don't run Windows. Microsoft's attempts at smaller-than-laptop units have been dismal failures. (Zune, anyone? Or a Windows tablet PC?) Non-Windows software has gotten good enough to drive the devices, and Windows isn't necessary for them. Nor is Java or Linux. The Barnes and Noble Nook e-reader uses Android, which is a Linux-y thing, but it isn't the common Linux that you download and boot off of CD-ROM.

We are entering a new world of software, an open frontier of possibilities. I expect that the new market will be fractured, with multiple vendors. In some ways, it doesn't matter, since people don't care what software runs their phone. All they want is to talk with their friends, send text messages and photos, play music, and surf the web.