The day computing died

Everything was fine that Thursday, but then the news came. Smart phones, according to analyst firm Canalys, were starting to outsell PDAs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (by 3.3 million to 2.8 million). Word was that this would only get worse (smart phones are expected to grow a whole order of magnitude next year). I was sitting at my desk, and I had a blue shirt on. As my world as IT/business journalist went belly up, I couldn`t even manage a pained smile.

I felt cheated, because I had it on good authority that information technology was supposed to be about business benefits. In other words, business drove IT. Either you saved money using IT products, or you made more of it, or collected it faster, or you saved time. This I knew to be true.

You could wonder why manufacturers bother to make computers, if what the market wants is polyphonic ring tones and inferior digital cameras, in a phone of all places.

Carel Alberts, technology editor, ITWeb

My proof? Markets swearing allegiance to any pitch making the appropriate business noises. The industry I felt at home in lived by this value mantra, and the media obligingly assumed its usual mentoring role in this great quest for bottom line benefit.

We thought we had it sussed. How foolish we were. But in a way, it figures. Didn`t you always suspect it?

Well, you could say your worst fears about the IT industry (as purveyors of non-essential gadgetry and/or vapourware, which has more often than not failed to fulfil its value promise) are now realised. You could say you always knew smart phones, the purest embodiment of today`s youthful arsing-around ethic, would kick PDA butt. You could talk up your own vision of convergence (between IT and telecoms) and try to ride this amazingly fickle wave of demand till you can`t sleep at night for lack of something to believe in.

Or, like me, you could wonder why manufacturers bother to make computers, if what the market wants is polyphonic ring tones (hey, you can now compose in chords!) and inferior digital cameras, in a phone of all places. Or why we, the media, ever believed the really important markets are composed of people older than 11 years old who want equipment that makes their lives better, more efficient and saves or makes them money.

A visiting Intel representative said something last month that rang with truth. "We put the wireless networking on the central processing unit, which kind of begs the question whether this is a PC or a communications device." But the man admitted that it is hard to tell, these days, where one device ends and the other begins.

So under the aegis of convergence, I`d say the easiest thing to do if you can`t beat them is to join them. Why argue for far better computing power and functionality, standards and an incorporation of telephony as an afterthought into a far superior platform, if instead you can have tinny ring tones, ersatz games, difficult keypads, an irreconcilable trade-off between imaging needs and display size and quality, data-supporting software that doesn`t work, menus that differ from here to Cairo between vendors and many, many more pleasures?

But one must concede defeat. Computing approached integration (or convergence) with telephony from the side of PDAs and other superior gadgets, while mobile phone-makers approached computing, after a fashion, from a (standards-wise) fragmented digital communications platform. And communications won, or is winning.

Consider these chilling words from the analyst responsible for that black Thursday: "Canalys suggests that handheld vendors don`t try to counter the smart phone boom by launching wireless handhelds (those with integrated GSM/GPRS/3G capability), which have sold in only tiny quantities and will continue to do so.

"Vendors should only launch wireless handhelds if they can differentiate themselves substantially from the devices that are already out there. If they are happy to dominate a niche part of the market then fine, but they need to offer a device capable of doing that. If they want to go after a bigger slice then they should focus on integrated Bluetooth and take advantage of the ever-increasing base of Bluetooth mobile phones and a handheld user base willing to upgrade to get the benefits of coupling the devices."

This is why I`m not a gambler. I always back the wrong horse. In the fight between Bill Gates and Netscape, I backed the better technology. I thought the Blair Witch Project was an important film, the anti-film, never to be repeated because it practically had anti-emulation code in its celluloid genes. Then came the Hollywood sequel.