SwitchBlade is off on a rant, could he sense that a return to old values for the PC market may in turn effect other markets, or is he just off his trolley? Read on to find out.
One of the main reasons that the IBM PC beat Amiga and Atari in the home computer market is diversity, the computers could be configured to your exact specification. They may not be as tidy or cutting edge as the Ataris and Amigas, hell the PC was still years behind the competition when it took over. Nontheless, the diversity in the specification of a PC was a main selling point, no longer were you tied to the manufacturer's spec and unable to upgrade it.
In recent years M$ have handed out the "reference model" design to manufacturers of it's pocket PCs, and as a result almost every pocket pc looks like every other one and has a similar system spec and price. The only possible reason for wanting a specific one is possibly the badge on the front or maybe the colour of the buttons on the body. Palm's devices were also starting to follow this trend of almost all looking and being the same until Sony walked in and took the Palm OS and stuck it on a machine that it designed with traditional Sony "look and feel" parts.
Now with the advent of the "Tablet PC", no not a PC you can swallow to cure illness, it is (for the uninitiated) a halfway house between a laptop and a pocket pc, a laptop with a reversable touchscreen and a little pen. To follow the reference design these PCs will all be practically the same and run windoze xp.
Now you may be wondering why people are willing to make devices that are practically the same as everyone elses. The reasoning is cost, in the same way to that of car manufacterers sharing body designs and chasis designs, the cost of production drops as only one set of tooling is needed and various companies share the costs. Then the products are sold at an "agreed" price between the companies so they all make about the same profit on the items.
Now manufacterers are seeing that they can save money by applying these reference models to the humble beige box on your desktop in an effort to cut costs and make more money. As has been seen on the pocket pc market reference models can cause designs and ideas to stagnate and also decreases the chance of variation in the interests of attracting consumers. Would you like to go down the shop and see a selection of all PCs, with about the same price, similar specs and all blatently designed with the same design in mind.
Now to look at another market, the mobile phone market. Manufacters are currently throwing all kinds of different designs and concepts at us in order to make their handset more attractive then the others. All a quite different although mostly concentrating on similar developments and selling points. Now to the fledgeling smartphone market, M$ has sold it's smartphone OS and reference model to the same manufacters of the pocket pcs, so we know what'll happen there. Nokia on the other hand with one OS (series 60) has already produced 3 vastly different devices, the 7650, 3650 and the soon to come N-gage. These devices are all marketed to different groups of people and the designs reflect that, the 7650 (and similarly Siemens new SX-1) are aimed at an older market, late teens and 20 somethings, the 3650 is aimed at kids who want something that stands out with the extra silly functions, and the N-gage is aimed at kids and teen gamers who will use their device more for playing games than making calls. The M$ reference model idea stifles this style of creativity and as such it may be some time until an M$ smartphone is so diverse.
But where was I heading, oh yes, the PC market, there is a fair amount of diversity in the manufacture of these various sized beige boxes, but in the future we may have just large PC, tiny PC, Desktop Laptop, Ultra-portable Laptop, with none of the grey areas in between. Although there may not seem a lot of diversity between the PC designs at fist glance, reading the system specs will reveal a lot of differences, would you forego those in order to have a market similar to the pocket pc, which would in the short term begin to stifle development of better products? I think I'll stick with building my own PCs.
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