Are Americans under-teched? Part Two
To illustrate the point, I walked through my home and took a survey of my "basic" electronics--telephone, stereo, microwave, and so on. Sure enough, despite the shiny packaging, none of my latest and greatest had really evolved in the last 10 years.
For Part Two, I've taken a look at my computer-related products to see if slumping PC sales might be caused by a similar product stagnation.
Before we get out the microscope, remember that I'm writing this on behalf of the average consumer, not the tech columnist or engineer who gets prototypes and glimpses of products that may someday shake things up for the better. I'm talking about the average person who lugs home the boxes and tries to integrate this tech purchase into their home life. What has happened in the last decade to make what's in those boxes more exciting and evolved than what came before?
Part Three will examine those products that have broken incredible new ground and are readily available and attractively priced. So if you don't see TiVo or digital cameras in the mix, it may be because they made the cut for that forthcoming installment.
The PC
I love PCs. I've built three of my own from scratch. I've never minded beige or yearned for a translucent cube on my desk, but the truth must be told: PCs are getting stale.
There was a time when motherboards routinely got smaller, when we worried about connectors and controllers, processor upgrades, and which sound card to buy. And then the PC just somehow wasn't worth that much effort.
Yes, they do get a bit faster every year, and yes, the hard drive capacity is ever-bigger, but if you really think about it, there's not much physically "new" to do with your PC once you attach a printer and connect to the Internet.
Apple does get a nod for making the PC look better and for showing people innovative things they can do with them, like connect a camcorder and make movies. Aside from those enhancements, however, what else is there to show that you couldn't show 15 years ago? Word processing, e-mail, personal finance?
The keyboard
Most of my keyboards look like they shipped with the IBM AT. The top is still covered in a daunting row of DOS-era function keys (have you used F4 lately?). Aside from a separate numeric keypad that seems to be standard these days, nothing has changed except the PS2 connector.
I do have one keyboard that controls the volume of my PC and comes with a non-functioning "Internet" button, and there are some curvy ergonomic models out there, but none of those "improvements" even happened in the past five years or so.
Maybe the keyboard has evolved as far as it can go, but if you stare at one long enough, nothing says "old-school computing" quite like the keyboard.
The monitor
Pricey flat-panel LCDs are available, but most people use still incredibly bulky CRT monitors.
"Innovations" include built-in speakers or speakers stuck to the side with an adhesive strip as well as onscreen fine-tuning. Then again, I could be writing this exact paragraph in 1993.
Palm Pilot
I love my Palm V, but I also own the original Palm with the US Robotics logo, and I can tell you that aside from a sleeker design and backlighting, nothing much has changed.
I do applaud Palm's OS for staying lean and mean and minus the feature bloat found in Windows, but after six years, I do think something, somewhere inside the Palm interface could look a little different. Don't you?
Laptop
Sad but true: My current laptop weighs about as much as the first Toshiba I used back in the '80s. The battery life is also about as long, although it does power up more peripherals than the old Toshiba, including a CD-ROM drive.
But if you really look at the laptop, what can you say about it that is truly revolutionary? Titanium shell? DVD player?
Who's to blame?
A number of ZDNet readers wrote me with excellent theories of why this stagnation has occurred. Many explained that users are too confused by the features most products have now and that adding more would only drive them away--especially since most features go unused.
Others pointed out that to keep prices low, innovation must suffer so that manufacturers can crank extremely low-cost electronics. And some readers chided me for simply being impatient, explaining that standards take time to develop.
The "answer" is probably a mix of all those reasons, but in my book that's still no excuse. Standards are often set when a single product breaks new ground at the right moment in time, like the original Palm Pilot or the IBM PC, and people have a funny way of opening their wallets for big ticket items when they find a product truly innovative and useful, such as the digital camera.
I firmly believe that our current crop of tools was once awe-inspiring, but they are simply getting rusty. I also think it won't take another add-in card or a new tax package to get people going again. It's going to take something on another order of magnitude to push computing back up the hill. And it can't take 10 years to get here.
I don't know about you, but that, in the end, is why I hang around.
Stay tuned for Part Three...and a great glimpse at some notable newcomers.
Alice Hill was the vice president of development and editorial director for CNET and is EVP of Cornerhardware.com. She covers technology every other week for ZDNet News, pondering everything from the wireless Web to why geeks love motor scooters and the twillight of the LCD display. She welcomes your comments and e-mails.