The computer industry can hardly have seen a worse year than 1992, and even companies that are still doing relatively well like Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc are turning in less than sparkling figures, while the problems that drove Wang Laboratories Inc into the arms of the bankruptcy court would have seen the likes of IBM Corp and Digital Equipment Corp heading in the same direction had they been saddled with the debt burden that Richard Miller inherited when he took the helm at Wang. It may be more for public consumption – it’s so difficult to lay off staff in Germany – than a real reflection of the state of the company, but a Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG official was quoted as saying that the 6,000 additional job cuts announced by the company this week were a matter of survival.
Earthquake
Groupe Bull SA would have disappeared long ago without the French government standing behind it. And the handful of companies that are riding the recession, which is greatly exacerbated by the violent structural changes that have put an earthquake under the industry – Dell Computer Corp, Microsoft Corp, Micro Focus Plc, Novell Inc – scarcely make up for the scores of companies that are forlornly wondering if good times will ever return. In such a climate it is hardly surprising that the industry is clutching at straws in its desperation to spot the next hit that will transform the entire climate and get the cash registers ringing up not sales of heavily discounted personal computers at cost, but genuine profits. One of the whitest hopes is pen-driven computing. There is a vast army of technophobes out there that are just waiting for the day when they can communicate with their personal computer by scribbling on it, the conventional wisdom says. The day when handwriting recognition software will be intelligent enough to recognise the average person’s scrawl is still a very long way off, but the technology is available and buyable for recognising printed characters. But where is the market? Apart from poets, there are few serious writers – in the sense of people that get an appreciable number of words written in a day, be they in the list of Macmillan or Mills & Boon, that still persevere with pen and paper once they have learned to use a word processor. After a few months, even the idea of going back to a typewriter fills them with deepest gloom. And the more one uses a keyboard, the less one wants to write, to the point where filling in forms or simply writing out an address becomes a disagreeable chore.
Lineman for the county
That is not to say that a pocket pen computer is not extremely useful in tasks like stock-taking, some kinds of simple order taking, and in checking things like the state of every one of mile upon mile of telegraph poles. But how many of us are stock control clerks for Tesco or the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, just how many of us are linemen for the county, driving the main roads? Back in 1984, there was a very simple little briefcase computer called the Tandy Model 100. Designed by Kyocera Corp, which also made variants for NEC Corp and Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, the simple Z80-based machine was useful for note-taking and writing first drafts on the train, and the machine won rave reviews in the computer trade press, particularly those that had become used to lugging Adam Osborne’s Osborne 1 around with them. Tandy Corp was sure it was on to a winner, and placed heavy orders with Kyocera. A year or so later, the machine was being heavily discounted, and Tandy was wondering where the vast promised market for it had gone. Problem was that all the rave reviews had been written by journalists, and journalists were the market for the thing: once every journalist that wanted one had it, the market was saturated. Another wonder of the computer world was going to be desktop publishing: desktop publishing was going to make everyone’s fortune, and companies plunged in left, right and centre. As it turned out, desk-top publishing made comfortable livings for Apple Computer Inc, Adobe
Systems Inc and two or three software companies that wrote the applications, and launched Hewlett-Packard into a major new business with its laser printers, which didn’t do Canon Inc any harm either. But desktop publishing still hasn’t really achieved its potential because whenever you ask a vendor how long it takes to lay out one of his beautiful pages, the answer is only 20 minutes which is 20 minutes that anyone on deadline doesn’t have, and the pitch that anyone can become their own editor and publisher comes close to breaching the Trade Descriptions Act, because the production process shouldn’t take any time – it has to be part of the creation process. It’s crazy to have to cut something to fit when you could write it to fit, but as long as creation and make-up are separate functions, that is not possible. And it’s not a problem that pen computing is going to solve. The first unmistakable sign that the pen computing market is a long way from being there yet was the news that pen pioneer Momenta International Inc was on the brink of closing its doors (CI No 1,987).
No compromises
A serious market for portable computers did finally arrive five years after Tandy launched the Model 100 – but that was because the industry came up with no-compromises portable computers. As we have noted, there is a market for pen computing, but for those that use an alphabet rather than a syllabary or an ideography, it is hard to see it being the vast market that its proponents suggest. The problem is that the no-compromises pen computer will offer pen control and pen input simply as an adjunct to other means of text and data entry – which for the foreseeable future will have to include a keyboard – and not the raison d’etre for the machine. And the same strictures apply to that other white hope, the computer that can be controlled, manipulated and dictated to purely with speech: does anyone really imagine that the data entry room of the future will house an army of clerks all shouting at their computers? An insuperable problem is that the two most widely used forms of human communication, speech and handwriting, are naturally unstructured and imprecise, where computers demand precision and impose it on what is created via the keyboard. And to make these forms of communication the natural user interface to the computer, the prerequisite will be not to change the computer but to alter the very nature of the human. Handwriting and speech technologies will find significant markets, but they are not the panaceas for all that ails the computer industry.
