There's an ongoing debate about whether the PC can ever supplant
the television to become the main receptacle for entertainment. What do you think will happen? Although the PC is the ultimate general-purpose computing device, its characteristics don't correspond well with what people want in a home-entertainment system. And so far, the cable and satellite vendors have refused to allow digital decoding on a PC, so the PC requires a complex hookup with (infrared) blasters and such, creating a very clumsy experience.
As a case in point, I challenge you to get any MP3 jukebox to rip CDs
and play music without ever hiccupping or causing your system to freeze
up. It's even worse when you try to play video clips. You can imagine if that freeze-up happened during the last 15 seconds of last year's Super Bowl.
What themes will shape the future of consumer electronics devices?
Storage and, specifically, hard drives...Before the end of this decade, the run-of-the-mill disk drive that consumers can buy will be able to store all the recorded music in the world. The challenge will be figuring out how to protect this content,
getting people to pay for this stuff and improving the navigation of it.
How will having significantly more storage change things?
As an example, a big-enough hard drive in a DVR (digital video recorder) can download and store a bunch of new pay-per-view movies overnight. So when you go to your set-top box the next day, you can play whatever you choose--instantly--without having to download content and stress a network. The ones you don't watch, you don't pay for.
Increasingly, you're going to find local disk drives used for that purpose: to aggregate a whole bunch of content--some of it free, some of it you record off channels you subscribe to, some of it for pay. With 1,000 hours of content on a DVR, you're going to have more speculative recordings of both videos and music.
What do you think navigation will look like on devices using these
huge hard drives?
Morpheus and Napster (file-sharing networks) are a glimpse of what the world will be like when you have multiterabyte disk drives. You can think of Morpheus as a
multiterabyte disk drive that you have at your disposable.
How will people manage these large hard drives full of data?
You have to have the information tagged robustly and consistently because no matter what (search methods) you build, it doesn't matter a bit if you don't have common reference points. Companies and industries need to settle on what those points should be, so that the industry can build one common database.
Once you have that, creative people begin thinking of any number of
ways--from searching content alphabetically to querying (a system for an item)--to keep track of content. And then speculative recording gets more refined and can better match your tastes.
What's the next step for content once storing it becomes less of an
issue?
From a (movie-making) point of view, you get to: "How do you make it
easier and essentially cheaper to make?"...We're working to create
complete, synthetic characters and make them look as real as we can.
We have a long way to go. No one has created a believable foreground
character, but they have done background characters. To get a close-up
of a face, clothes, hair, sweat--that's quite an effort. If we can
create these realistic-looking characters and settings, we could save
huge amounts of money on film production. In fact, we could get to the
point where we've created a new kind of independent film, one which is
completely computer-generated that looks like live action.
Two products that I think may get some traction are Intel's media adapters and Media Center PCs. And I suspect these things are probably going to lead to a Napster-like experience for video. You'll end up with just a lot of pirated content out there.
How do you think computing interfaces will change?
A leap for computing interfaces would be changing the way we think about how we interact with a device. With a PC, you have to go through a number of layers before you get to the document you want to use. Something we worked on and prototyped at Apple (Computer) under the code-name Pink--but it never came together--was document-centric or media-centric computing. The idea is that you sit down at a computer and a document comes up, which has different applications that apply to different parts of it.
How would that work?
If you're using a spreadsheet, then the code in the operating system to
deal with spreadsheets comes up. If the document is text, then the code
to deal with text comes up and so on. We see wisps of this come up in
different places. You can bring up a column-editor in Word that's kind
of like Excel, and they sort of talk to each other in a way. With HTML
and Internet Explorer, you begin to see those things. But we should have a document (interface) and companies should be developing plug-ins for
this interface. You shouldn't be going through applications; the
applications should be behind-the-scenes doing what they need to do. I
think it is ripe to happen but never will because of the state of the
market.
What is the biggest myth about consumer electronics that will be
dispelled in the next couple of years?
That the historical success of a category defines the viability of
future products in that category. For example, MP3 players were
introduced five years ago with marginal success. No one thought much of
the category. Then the (Apple) iPod came out last year with an excellent design, and it was a roaring success, proving that the category was just waiting for a good version.
The same is true with DVRs. So far, rollout has been slow, but that's because no one has yet formulated a great DVR product. You can tell it will be a huge success because people adore their DVRs.
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