Thesis 52

At most, everyware will subsume traditional computing paradigms. It will not supplant themcertainly not in the near term.

In determining when everyware might realistically arrive, the first notion that we need to dispense with is that it is an all-or-nothing proposition. Just as there are still mainframes and minicomputers chugging away in the world, doing useful work unthreatened by the emergence of the PC, the advent of ubiquitous computing will not mean the disappearance of earlier forms.

Wearables, embedded sensors, RFID-based infrastructures of one sort or another, and the many other systems that we've here defined as ubiquitous in nature canin fact already dohappily coexist with thoroughly ordinary desktops and laptops. Even after information processing begins to pervade the environment in more decisive ways, there will continue to be a healthy measure of backward compatibility; for some time yet to come, anyone writing a dissertation, keeping a budget, or designing a logo will be likely to interact with conventional applications running on relatively conventional machines.

Personal computers of relatively familiar aspect will continue to be made and sold for the foreseeable future, though they will increasingly tend to be conceived of as portals onto the far greater functionality offered by the local constellation of ubiquitous resources. Such PCs may well serve as the hub by which we access and control the mélange of technical systems imperceptibly deployed everywhere around us, without ever quite disappearing themselves. We could say the same of the various "Ubiquitous Communicator"-style phones that have been proposed, in that they'll persist as discrete objects very much at the focus of attention.

It's true that this kind of setup doesn't go terribly far toward fulfilling Weiser and Brown's hopes for a calm technology, but neither is it quite what we've thought of as personal computing historically. Such scenarios illustrate the difficulties of inscribing a hard-and-fast line between the two paradigms, let alone specifying a date by which personal computing will indisputably have disappeared from the world. Moreover, there will always be those, whatever their motivation, who prefer to maintain independent, stand-alone devicesand if for no other reason than this, the personal computer is likely to retain a constituency for many years past its "sell-by" date.

The safest conclusion to draw is that, while there will continue to be room for PCs in the world, this should not be construed as an argument against the emergence of a more robust everyware. If the border between personal and ubiquitous computing is not always as clear as we might like, that should not be taken as an admission that the latter will not turn out to have enormous consequences for all of us.