8.5 Conclusion

Designing intelligent appliances is not very complicated, if you always keep the human in the center. The biggest issue is to design an appliance that is cheap enough for many people to afford, but powerful enough to attract a large audience. At the same time, it needs to be easy to use and adapt itself to the needs of the user .

As the hardware gets cheaper, and prices for memory and CPUs are constantly falling, it becomes easier to get the price right and the power right. The further you look into the future, the faster the devices will be and the more memory they can hold for the same price. At the same time, the power consumption is going to be reduced and rechargeable batteries will become better (where necessary), making it possible to increase the longevity of the service and the appliance. The hardware should be only the container for the me-centric services and agents and should be used for input/output purposes in a special situation. The appliance, fundamentally, does the work for a person, and to do this, it " knows " something task-specific that permits the user to delegate decision making and acting authority to the appliance.

The customer, ultimately, is valuing the ability of the appliance to perform tasks , i.e., to render services, or "accomplish transactions in the real world." Thus, the new appliances are really service performers; this means customers are buying service performers, paying for services, and valuing the ability of the appliances to become better over time.

Improvement in service performance is most likely to come from updating the software (from central casting) or, even more likely, the appliance learning and improving how best to satisfy its users in the particular tasks they do most often and in the way they most prefer to have them done. This new class of appliances will be a major breakthrough in efficiency for business and leisure activities.

Now that we know which components are required to implement a me-centric solution, Chapter 9 provides some thought on the impact of these new technologies on society.



Radical Simplicity. Transforming Computers Into Me-centric Appliances
Radical Simplicity: Transforming Computers Into Me-centric Appliances (Hewlett-Packard Press Strategic Books)
ISBN: 0131002910
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 88

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