The Shape of Things to Come: Industry Execs Eyeball the '90s
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
LAS VEGAS (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- A Comdex panel of
six experts gave their views on the future of personal computers
in the next five years and beyond. That's become a standard
feature of Comdexes; what made this one different is that instead
of the usual collection of newsletter editors and industry
analysts, the prognosticators were six key decision-makers from
IBM, Microsoft, Compaq, Novell, Symantec, and Sun -- people with
the power to make their predictions a reality.
 
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's vice president for systems software,
led off the session by suggesting that graphical user interfaces
will be critical to "drive PC penetration forward." GUIs are "a
prerequisite for high-volume systems," he said. Ballmer also told
the audience that two other elements would be critical in the
next half-decade: the ability to work easily with multiple
applications from different software developers, and "information
at your fingertips," the ability to use all business or personal
information you need with any application.
 
"In the '80s," said Gordon Eubanks, president of Symantec, "the
PC changed the world, if not the computer world, forever." In the
90s, he said, their role will expand from serving individual
needs to serving the collective needs of groups. But Eubanks said
the industry needs evolution, not revolution -- "From the
customer's point of view, they're not interested in abandoning
standards."
 
The PC world will look different in five years, he said; with
multiple standards, data transparency across platforms will
become critical, and the tough job will be choosing the
appropriate platform for the job, not just sticking to a single
dominant standard.
 
(Eubanks also told the crammed Comdex conference-room audience
that "The last time I spoke before an audience this big was at a
show called CP/M '83. Things in the industry were changing then,
too." He paused, then quipped, "If all those people had just
bought CP/M-86, things would have been better, much better." The
crowd laughed; Microsoft's Steve Ballmer was sitting next to
Eubanks, who was once responsible for marketing Digital
Research's version of CP/M for the IBM PC -- and Eubanks said,
"Well, much better for some of us, anyway.)
 
 
Less Frontier in the '90s
Bill Joy, vice president of research and development for Sun
Microsystems, compared the growth of PCs to the settlement of the
western United States, spreading out across a vast prairie of
empty desktops. In the '90s, he said, there will be less
opportunity to move into open spaces, and the challenges will be
different. "The frontier aspect has got to change," he said. Joy
suggested that OS/2's future is no longer a foregone conclusion;
the majority of desktop machines in the year 2000 will run DOS or
Unix, he said.
 
Compaq North America president Mike Swavely forecast a
significant improvement in price/performance ratios for PCs. Open
industry standards would provide the evolutionary change critical
for the '90s, he said, pointing out that in 10 years the
computing world had gone from 80% of customers depending on a
single source to 80% depending on systems from multiple vendors.
Swavely also said that economics will continue to make
independent computer dealers important: 65 to 80 percent of PCs
are sold through dealers, and that means "the dealer plays a key
role in integrating systems to meet customer requirements,"
Swxvely said.
 
 
"An Evolutionary Thing"
Fernand Sarrat, general manager of new business opportunities for
IBM's desktop software division, agreed with the other panelists.
"The future is kind of an evolutionary thing," he said. He
predicted that personal computing will give way to connected
computing: "The infrastructure is being built for managing group
processes." Notebook computing would become ever more important
with the convergence of laptop technologies, handwriting
recognition, and stylus technology, which will bring more people
into computing.
 
Ray Noorda, president of Novell, said the '90s will be a
transition time for mainframes, minicomputers, and PCs, but that
none of those categories will disappear; instead, the definitions
will change. "The mainframe will be a depository," Noorda said,
and minis will also continue; there will be "at least four
cultures -- DOS, OS/2, Unix, and Mac -- and they all have to be
made to look as if they're the same operating system, and they
certainly will be." Companies like Novell, he said, will face
stiffer competition for performance for networks, which Noorda
described as "on the inflection point" for distributed systems.
 
Industry analyst Will Zachmann, who organized the session,
likened that "inflection point" to a shift from guerilla warfare
to large-scale artillery battles, as large proprietary systems
are replaced by less expensive, micro-based open systems -- "the
single biggest change since the invention of the digital computer
in the 1940s," he said.
 
 
Laptops, Memory, Multimedia, and No More Bus Wars
The panelists hit upon a variety of areas when fielding questions
from the audience, to wit:
 
Will laptops listen? Ray Noorda, confessing to be a poor typist,
said he hopes laptops acquire voice-recognition capabilities. But
IBM's Sarrat said "it's still a few years ahead." Eubanks pointed
out that "voice recognition is only a piece of the puzzle," and
that such systems wouldn't work without natural-language
recognition, which would continue to evolve over the next five
years. Bill Joy pointed out that voice isn't always the best
medium: "Imagine everybody in this room talking into their PC;
with all that noise, you wouldn't be able to hear."
 
How much memory will systems have in 1995? "A standard system
will have 16 megabytes," said Swavely. "A lot of 2-meg systems,"
countered Joy. "Four- and 16-megabyte systems," said Eubanks.
(Glancing at Microsoft's Ballmer, he said, "There aren't
currently any applications that need this much memory; I'm not
talking about operating systems here," to which Ballmer replied
that OS/2 would get smaller; "We've been on a diet," he said.)
IBM's Sarrat insisted that OfficeVision demonstrates that a "rich
application environment requires 4 to 16 megabytes."
 
And how much will 4 megabytes of RAM cost a year from now? "Bill
Joy tells me $250," Ballmer said, and pointed out that in the
last 18 months, RAM prices have dropped by nearly 70 percent.
 
What about multimedia, the subject of the Comdex keynote address?
IBM's Sarrat suggested that it would slowly progress from
entertainment to business applications, while Microsoft's Ballmer
said his company takes "a more aggressive view . . . we're
driving multimedia into business applications as rapidly as
hardware power and software creativity allow."
 
What will be the place of the personal computer in the average
household? "They'll be functionally built into the basic wiring
of the home. PC technology will be part of the book, part of the
appliance," suggested Mike Swavely.
 
And will IBM and the cloners continue fighting over Micro Channel
and EISA? "There's a very strong philosophical difference," said
Compaq's Swavely, insisting that EISA partisans believe in open
industry standards. IBM's Surrat agreed that there are
philosophical differences: "Do you decide to move on to new
technology or squeeze the most you can out of existing systems?"
Sun's Bill Joy, whose company uses neither bus, thought it didn't
matter: "In five years most desktop machines will be replaced by
laptops anyway, and neither of these buses are appropriate to
laptops -- the cards are too big." Thus, said Joy, both EISA and
MCA "will be wiped out by technological progress."
 
                              --- Frank Hayes
 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
