What does the slowdown in PC sales mean? To the big computer manufacturers - Compaq, Gateway, IBM, Dell - it's just an unwelcome blip on a rising trend, a regrettable intrusion of old economy business cycles into their brave new world.
However, to observers such as Don Norman, the celebrated computer design guru, the slowdown heralds something quite different: nothing less than the beginning of the end for the personal computer as we know it. In Norman's view, the PC is doomed because it is too complicated for ordinary human beings. Making serious use of a PC, he says, requires a level of technical proficiency that is way beyond the average citizen. The learning curve is just too steep. And besides, most people have better things to do with their time than learn about Windows system calls.
And why is the PC so complicated? Answer: because it's a general purpose device. Given the right software, a PC can do an astonishing range of things - from spreadsheet number-crunching and word processing, through speech recognition and three-dimensional graphics to interactive games, musical composition, web publishing and a zillion other things.
The machine on which I'm writing this holds most of my favourite music tracks and can play them on demand. It also holds my family's collection of digital photographs, and allows me to display and edit them to my heart's content. It hooks up to a webcam and to the net, it can send and receive faxes, and so on.
To Norman and his colleagues, however, my computer looks awfully like the domestic electric motor in the 1918 Sears Roebuck mail-order catalogue. Electric motors were a big deal in 1918. Sears sold a magnificent model that could do virtually anything provided you possessed the appropriate attachment. Under the headline 'Aids that every Woman Appreciates' the catalogue explains that the $8.75 'Home Motor' can drive a fan, churn milk, whip cream, sharpen and grind tools and do dozens of other useful tasks. There was even a vibrator attachment, though its uses are left to the imagination.
In the years since that catalogue was published, the electric motor that was such a big deal in 1918 has become ubiquitous. Electric motors are everywhere nowadays - in watches, cameras, hi fi systems, washing machines, microwave ovens, fridges, power tools, garage doors and heating systems.
In fact, they are so common that we no longer notice them: they have effectively become invisible. And they have also become incredibly specialised - nobody sells general-purpose motors any more.
And that, says Norman, provides a good analogy for what will happen to computers. They will become miniaturised, ubiquitous and invisible, metamorphosing into specialised 'information appliances'. Thus if I want to send an email in the future, I will no longer have to boot up a PC and load a mail program. Instead, I'll just open my email device and start typing (or dictating, or whatever).
For most people the decline of the fiendishly complex PC is something devoutly to be wished for. They look forward to an age of simple devices that you just switch on and use. But a downside to these information appliances is only now beginning to surface - namely that they will be intrinsically more controllable by the industries that make them and provide content to run on them.
For example, heavy-duty copy protection can be hardwired into such devices. This will prescribe exactly what the owner is allowed to do with them in a way that is impossible with the complex old personal computer.
In other words, we may wind up exchanging the complexities of freedom for the restrictions of specialisation. Norman may well be right about the fate of the generalist PC. But we may live to rue its demise.
