Comments on: Thirty years with computers

User design guru Jakob Nielsen looks back to 1974 and ahead to 2034 to understand where PCs may be heading.

[royc]

What? No Holodeck?

I would at least expect to have a 2 cubic meter Holo screen with total movement sensors by that time.

But you may be right. Display is the slowest part of the computer system to move up.

dissapointing

Well the article didn't add anything to my knowledge let alone inspire my imagination.
We read Isaaz Asimov fictions and they give us
guidelines as to type of things that we should be
working to achieve in future. How good is the
prediction of CRT resolutions in 2034, instead tell me what type of application and what I/Os you expect to see so I'd go and work on them.

Oysterdock brings future today

Innovative things are being done today.
example:

www.oysterdock.com

[ace942]

Some things won't change

Some things like people over charging on shipping will still be going on at eBay in 2034 :)

Nielsen -- stuck in the past

I've never been impressed with Nielsen's writings or his self-imposed status as a usability guru. But he's been in the computer industry a long time, and I have a tremendous respect for his experience. Unfortunately for us, he doesn't grace us with stories from that experience. Instead he gives us this myopic extrapolation of current trends, the equivalent of taking a 2 year slope of the stock market and extending it along a straight line 30 years into the future.

Why would we care about chip speeds or bandwidth? Neither directly affect the lives of everyday consumers. In fact for most newly developing Internet services such as voice or video, speed, not bandwidth, is the key to a quality product. The Internet of the future will be judged by latency and robustness as much as it is by bandwidth.

More importantly, Nielsen is stuck on the PC box paradigm. Looking back at the last 30 years of change in computers, I find it hard to believe that the computers of 30 years from now will even be describable within the paradigm of today's machines. Chip speed? Gigabytes?

The personal computers of today are no more powerful than computers of 20 years ago. They are just much smaller and much less expensive. Following that logic, we can envision computers of the future as powerful as the computers of today--only much smaller and cheaper.

Nielsen is missing a major trend in electronics--flexible, cheap IC printing. In the future it's likely that electronics will not necessarily be more powerful than they are today, just much, much cheaper and more pervasive. The goal, as one CEO has said, is make electronics too cheap to meter.

Nielsen's an interesting person, but he fell into the trap of the anniversary essay--he looked ahead and guessed. This piece would have been much much better as a true retrospective. He missed his chance to share his true value--his experiences throughout the history of computers.

I guarantee...

If you are using windows 2034 you will need all 3PHz's and every petabyte of memory...