The New IBM

When DisplayWriter, by IBM, was still the dominant word processing software, my company was faced with a decision on upgrading. I don't recall what decision was made, but I do recall that it wasn't DisplayWriter. DisplayWriter was ruled out because it could not write to an Ascii file which was the universal word processing file type at the time. It could read Ascii, it just couldn't output to Ascii, meaning that once you modified a report in DisplayWriter, future modifications had to be done with Displaywriter. Rather than cementing the IBM software as the only choice, the Ascii situation cemented Displaywriter as a definitely not. Personal tech decisions can be less pragmatic. However, repeated instances of not putting the consumer first can wear on a company's brand and, eventually, marketshare.

In Europe, cell phones are required to have a micro-USB connector. In addition to convenience for the customer, this minimizes waste from having to continually buy multiple new chargers and discard the old. Preserving connections such as preserving connections to other types of word processing software minimizes the headaches and expenses of upgrading system components without having to upgrade everything. In some sense, this is more important to the consumer as no one wants to toss all of their old peripherals in order to upgrade particularly if their peripheral is an automobile with a dock made for the old device with the old connector. I imagine the automakers are not pleased with the idea of a new connector either as they had been considering closer integration of car functions with the owners mobile device.

In Rugged Displays I mention how, although consumer cared about every bit of weight, they held little value for increasingly thinner notebooks once they got under an inch. We also now know that 80-90% of cell phone users jacket their phones, sometimes increasing the thickness by triple. As with many factors in consumer design, thinness can be pushed to the point of diminishing returns or even no value beyond bragging rights. To be sure, bragging rights are important for branding but they are easily trumped by features that carry real benefit.

The Film Rolls No More

When the IBM PC was introduced in the early 1980's the component cost of the 5 1/4" floppy drive was about $550. After some initial rapid cost reductions and a format change (with a capacity increase) around 1987, the device settled into a very regular 18% per year cost reduction. Although there were some attempts to expand the device capacity at the end of its life, the floppy basically relied on predictable annual cost reductions to remain on the PC platform. The image to the side is from an old technical paper of mine on integrated optics. Being partly a mechanical device and flash being made by photolithograpy, it was a matter of time before flash replaced the floppy; but floppies did not live that long and flash thumb drives are now used like floppies were although I am still waiting for AOL to start sending me dozens of free thumb drives in the mail. (Before net connections were standard, AOL used to send out its net connection software on floppy disk to anyone that they remotely thought might have a computer.)

Floppies were cheap enough to be considered free but lacked the capacity of a hard drive or tape. However, like tape, it was removable from the device and made for easy transfer of data from one machine to another. But therein lies the rub. Removable media are more a form of communications than they are of storage. Though the floppy was, in some ways competing with tape or a hard drive, the real competition was the internet. As files grew bigger and the internet grew more capable there was no longer any point to having a floppy disk. About the same time floppies were going away, optical discs (with a c) were on the rise. Optical discs were cheaper and much higher capacity. However, advancement of the internet and of wireless capacity has been relentless. Even the cheapest DVDs and Blu Rays today come with a WiFi connection standard and increasingly rarely get used to actually play discs.

Tape has disappeared as well. Hard drives were on a steeper cost curve and tapes inability to do random access did it in. AS on the PC platform, Tape's optical cousin, film, survived for much longer having inherently much higher data capacity. However,Fuji is now discontinuing its motion picture film business, shortly after Kodak announced its exit from the business as well. Although the decision may be credited to a general trend to have everything digital, end to end, it is really the low cost of digital transport rather than any cost advantage of digital storage. It was the combination of cheap hard drive storage and vanishingly small data delivery (as opposed to carting around 100 pound rolls of film) that spelled the end for film at the movie theater.

Film, of course, is not disappearing completely. Very high end theatrical projection such as Imax will continue as film is still top end as a theatrical display technology rather than as a communications or storage device. I earlier published a list of my favorite display related movies. There were only 9 in my top ten. Cinema Paradiso is my #10. Here's to film.

Fine

Brick and Mortar gets a Boost

Three recent stories give some solace for the brick and mortar (B&M) retailers: Showrooming Debunked By Sales Data: CEA, Sun Sets on Endless E-Commerce Summer as Sales Tax Comes to Amazon, LG Switching To A “One Price” On-Line Policy for HDTV, Blu-ray Players and More. The CEA data is a bit suspect as the internal figures given in the story don't reconcile. However, assuming that the CEA has it reasonably accurate, showrooming is not as big of a problem as was suspected, and the playing field between B&Ms and on-line has shifted in the B&Ms favor.

TVii vs iTV

Simple for the Consumer

One of the big complaints retailers have with consumer electronics is that they can be complicated. Much of the technology development in TV sets has been in the form of attachments rather than developments in the set itself. As a result, the consumer is left with numerous boxes connected to their TV set and that can be connected to each other in a variety of ways. Though as long as audio is connected to audio, video to video, and signal out is plugged into signal in the system will work, it may not work well. Additionally, as there is no central control switching from one content source to another can be confusing. Smart remotes have been offered by companies such as Logitech and Acoustic Research that automate source changing; however these tend to require even more A/V skills to program initially. Google TV also offered some advanced capability in switching media, but has not been much of a success to this point.

Now comes Nintendo with a device that promises to make source switching very simple. It is agnostic with respect to content provider and provides additional services that form the basis of new usage models for watching TV. The new Nintendo game controller has a relatively large touch screen that can be used as a second POP screen (Picture outside of Picture) or provide additional information such as what happened in the show before you tuned in. Sounds great.

The Nintendo controller interfaces directly with the boxes around your TV through the a traditional IR interface. As bits of the technology get emulated on other platforms such as as a smartphone or tablet App, the recently buried IR interface might find its way back onto smartphones and perhaps into digital signage as well. The availability of a touchpanel system control might also further spur the consolidation of home theater attachments back into the TV, the controller,or into existing only as a service such as what is already happening to the DVR and optical drive.

There have been numerous rumors of a new Apple branded TV set ushering new paradigms for TV watching. Baring a substantially different direction by Apple, they may be loosing their "first mover" status in TV set usage innovation. This new product by Nintendo might spark a round of innovation in the industry ahead of the launch of any Apple branded TV set. Certainly the names GamePad and TVii seem to be making a statement. The 6.2" screen of the GamePad put it between the smallest tablets and the largest cell phones. Emulating this kind of functionality in a cell phone sized screen might not work well. The device also has Near Field Communications (NFC) which was anticipated but not found on the iPhone 5. NFC may facilitate on the spot purchase of content or user identification for restricted content. The device shows a great deal of both creativity and and business acumen.