The first major computer revolution occurred when computers shrank to room size from filling entire buildings. With that change, coupled with a dramatic decline in cost and increase in power, the kinds of problems they were used for broadened from problems in astrophysics to mundane corporate accounting and payroll processing.
The second revolution occurred when computers shrank from filling a room to sitting on a desktop, and prices shrank from a few million dollars to a few thousand while their power continued to explode. This caused the market the broaden again: almost anyone in a white collar or professional field could and did use them.
The next revolution has already started. Now powerful computers can be held in your hand, and purchased for less than $1,000. These computers will eventually lead to computers that are worn and used as seemingly intelligent personal assistants. Indeed, there are people working on wearable computers right now, such as Steve Mann of the University of Toronto (www.wearcam.org), and privately-held Arial Systems of Chicago (www.arialsystems.com), but such products won't come into widespread use for several years.
What is right here, right now is the hand-held revolution: powerful computers without a keyboard. This field divides into two parts: white-collar use, and outdoor use. White collar hand-helds, like those made by PalmPilot, are used primarily for things like appointments, address books, e-mail, and note-taking, and often come with wireless communication abilities. Either these functions will develop into wearable computers, or the evolution will come from the other direction: wireless phone manufacturers Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson are working with U.K. software company Psion to create a wireless phone with computer capabilities right now.
Meanwhile, the other half of the revolution lies in so-called outdoor computing. Typical of the hardware in this field is a new ruggedized computer without keyboards by Fujitsu. Machines like this will extend an organization's computing power into the field, with organizations like FedEx and UPS leading the way.
Workers in the outdoor computing sector may be 'on call' service people for telcos, public utilities, and other service organizations, insurance sales and claims people, members of the U.S. Forest Service, census takers, farmers and agricultural researchers, inspectors for international aid organizations, mining prospectors, wildlife researchers, pest control officers, disease vector scientists, medical personnel including doctors and nurses, mobile sales and delivery people, building permit inspectors, health inspectors, or any of hundreds of other categories of workers.
This will produce explosive growth. One player has estimated that there will be 150 million hand-held computers by 2003, and that by 2010, there will be two- to three-times as many mobile computers (including laptops) as desktop computers.
I became aware of the potential of this field when I was engaged to act as an advisor to FieldWorker Products, of Toronto (www.fieldworker.com), a privately-held company may have the 'killer app' for outdoor computing: easy-to-use software that allows workers to collect, assess, verify, and collate data in the field, upload it by satellite or phone to head office, and, with a standard Global Positioning System receiver, stamp the data with the exact location as well. Organizations can define a data collection template without computer programmers, much as a spreadsheet can be used by an ordinary office worker. With such a template, workers in the field can collect data more quickly, with more detail, fewer errors, and without data transcription from paper to electronic media. The payback on this kind of hand-held system is measured in months, weeks, or even days.
Meanwhile, the hand-held revolution will cause history to repeat itself in another way as well. IT departments are ignoring hand-held computers as toys, unworthy of consideration, while end users are rushing to buy them. With prices dropping, and hand-held power soaring, IT departments will, once again, be faced with the three great problems they encountered after ignoring the desktop revolution: lack of standardized equipment, incompatible data from different platforms and software, and poor data security.
History repeats itself, if not in detail, then at least in human errors. Don't let your organization get caught flat-footed by the hand-held revolution happening right now, or by the wearable computer revolution just over the horizon.
© Copyright, Incremax Financial Research Corporation, July 1999.
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