Convergence my foot

Every so often, I'll read an article on the web, and someone will mention one of those memes that seems to go around: What's going to replace my computer? The PDA? Set-top Boxes? Smart phones? Internet Appliances? Everyone has their idea. And I have mine: Nothing.

The problem with all the replacement objects du jour is their specificity, and their crappy interfaces. PDA's for instance, which seem to be on the slow march out. I've owned six of the buggers, and the experience is always the same: It starts out really neat. It's handy to snap out your PDA, scribble in a to-do or event, and sock it away again. But then what do you do? You sync it to your computer. And eventually, the convenience of easy access is outweighed by the undeniable annoyance of using a pen to write text. Just give me a keyboard, please. And a mouse.

What about set-top boxes? I guess I just don't get this one. People want computers on their TV? Really? WebTV really took off, didn't it? Perhaps I want to watch movies that are stored digitally. But why not just beam it over from my computer? Because using remote controls to handle serious interface navigation is a pain in the ass, and managing a library of movies involves serious navigation. Just give me a fucking mouse and a keyboard. See the pattern?

Most pundits espousing these sort of views tend to point to some specialized gadget, but computers can do so many things in so many ways. To fully replicate a computer's feature set, you'd need a wrack of gadgets, or a few "combined" gadgets. And combined gadgets suck a lot. So where's the win in that?

I'm sure we'll find more and more ways to connect the things in our lives to computers. I'm sure sooner or later, our fridges really will be online, and we really will turn on the oven from work, or re-cycle the drier so our socks are warm when we get home. And I'm sure at the center of all this will still be the good old, oft maligned, but as yet un-replaced, personal computer. Maybe it'll be a thin client, running off the network. Who knows. But it'll be there, with it's do-anything, keyboard and mouse-driven glory.

Which is all to say, Steve Jobs is right. Again.