The Decline of PCs and Search?
November 4, 2012
I worked through “The Slow Decline of PCs and the Fast Rise of Smartphones/Tablets Was Predicted in 1993.” The main point is that rocket scientist cook and patent expert, Nathan P. Myhrvold anticipated the shift from desktop computers to more portable form factors. Years earlier I remember a person from Knight Ridder pitching a handheld gizmo which piggybacked on the Dynabook. When looking for accurate forecasts and precedents, those with access to a good library, commercial databases, and the Web can ferret up many examples of the Nostradamus approach to research. I am all for it. Too many people today do not do hands on research. Any exercise of this skill is to be congratulated.
Here’s the main point of the write up in my opinion:
His memo is amazingly accurate. Note that his term “IHC” (Information Highway Computer) could be roughly equated with today’s smartphone or tablet device, connecting to the Internet via WiFi or a cellular network. In his second last paragraph, Myhrvold predicts the winners will be those who “own the software standards on IHCs” which could be roughly equated with today’s app stores, such as those on iOS (Apple), Android (Google, Amazon) and Windows 8 (Microsoft). The only thing you could say he possibly didn’t foresee would be the importance of hardware design in the new smartphone and tablet industry.
Let’s assume that Mr. Myhrvold was functioning in “I Dream of Jeannie” mode. Now let’s take that notion of a big change coming quickly and apply it to search. My view is that traditional key word search was there and then—poof—without a twitch of the soothsayer’s nose, search was gone.
Look at what exists today:
- Free search which can be downloaded from more than a dozen pretty reliable vendors plus the Apache Foundation. Install the code and you have state of the art search, facets, etc.
- Business intelligence. This is search with grafted on analytics. I think of this as Frankensearch, but I am old and live in rural Kentucky. What do you expect?
- Content process. This is data management with some search functions and a bunch of parsing and tagging. Indexing is good, but the cost of humans is too high for many government intelligence organizations. So automation is the future.
- Predictive search. This is the Google angle. You don’t need to do anything, including think too much. The system does the tireless nanny job.
So is search in demise mode? Yep. Did anyone predict it? I would wager one thin dime that any number of azure chip consultants will have documents in their archive which show that the death of search was indeed predicted. One big outfit killed a “magic carpet tile” showing the search industry and then brought it back.
So search is not dead. Maybe it was Mark Twain who said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Just like PCs, mainframes, and key word search?
Stephen E Arnold, November 4, 2012
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