Where's the innovation?

What happened to PDAs and digital ink? At one point not too many years ago, Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs were proliferating, tablet PCs were clearing the horizon and better display and input technologies seemed nearly at hand. Fast forward five to eight years, and what has changed in that arena? Almost nothing. Palm still has a proprietary OS and its hardware is underpowered and sloppy. Windows CE is the retarded kid Microsoft hides in the bedroom when the relatives come over. Some graduate students may be carrying tablet PCs around with them in the chem lab, but I don't see them at Starbucks. Instead everyone has the same basic hardware they did a decade ago - a laptop, a cell phone, and an iPod. OK, iPods weren't around 10 years ago, but Walkmen were and the Rio was starting to catch on.

It wasn't too long ago that IBM created a monitor called the T221, which was a 22" widescreen LCD display, nothing revolutionary there, but get this: It had a native resolution of 3840x2400. That's right, 9 megapixels on a single monitor. Think about the possibilities of that sort of pixel density: truly immersive gaming with no need for antialising, font fidelity and flourishes that would make reading from a screen much more like booklike and less eye straining, entire digital photos displayed on a monitor at a 1:1 pixel ratio, with no need to make a high resolution print to see how the image "really" came out. At the time I just assumed we were headed toward smaller but denser displays, better handwriting and speech recognition, and other breakthroughs that would integrate electronics more intimately into our lives than before. The whole "wearable computing" thing.

But we're caught in some kind of iteration where TVs and computer displays are getting bigger but not better per square inch. Graphics cards remain separate entities than either allow content creation for movies and videogames (on the business side) or that allow amazing physics that is only used by a non-mainstream contingent of PC and console gamers and ignored by a general public that has yet to accept a 3D workspace OS environment, much less demand better ways of storing, sorting, and linking their data (think about the gloves Tom Cruise wore in Minority Report). People still type their files in Word or in an email or, like I do, in Notepad for crying out loud. They don't talk to their computers except to occasionally curse at them. We're still using mice, and many are still tethered by cords to a box that looks suspiciously like they did in the mid 90s. Consoles have become more sophisticated and re-established the living room, not the bedroom or office, as the game room, but the console industry is even more segmented into narrowly-defined genres where glossy predictability and bullet-point features are the order of the day, not creativity.

People talk about an iPod "revolution". I don't know about you but when I was a teenager laying out at the pool, everyone was listening to portable cassette players that weren't all that different than what we're doing now. DVDs have replaced VHS but the quality of its image has been a disappointment in my opinion, and not having a true surround audio standard has left all but the highest-end home theater installations looking and sounding no better then in years past, for all the hype. You could watch Star Wars on a laser disc in the 80s with a Bang & Olafson audio setup that would give you darn near the top-end experience you can get now.

What's happened has been an almost total halt of true innovation, and an interregnum of refinement of previous breakthroughs making that tech cheaper and available around the world at the commodity rather than the novelty level. PCs have become ingrained in our lives not because they do anything differently than they did in the 80s and 90s, but just because now everyone has one, so communication via email, IM, Skype, and multiplayer gaming is practical. All these innovations had already occurred, but now they've matured and worked their way into our daily lives.

I think the expectations for rampant technology growth were significantly OVERestimated and our lives haven't changed as much as we thought they would have by now. Remember the idea of the paperless office? There's more paper than ever! Things never move in the direction you think they will. It's turned out that little things like having a camera and keyboard on your wireless phone have been huge hits, while items seemingly so useful like digital paper or flexible screens have not. To speculate about why this is would be more of an exercise in psychology than my tired brain has the will for at the moment, but it does go to show that the "pundits" in any industry, over the long run, are usually no better at market prediction than a coin is. And coins are cheaper to consult.