The Computer Industry After A Decade Of Loss

by Adam Luoranen
January 2009

When computer industry pundits try to predict the future, it's understood
that there is always a certain amount of uncertainty involved. No one knows
the future, and predicting the future of a relatively fast-moving field like
technology is even more questionable. In general, even among experts, visions
of what will happen in the future are often shaped by personal opinion, bias,
or whim as much as by real information.

A less often-recognized truism, however, is that differences of viewpoint
exist even regarding circumstances existing in the present. No crystal ball,
psychic ability, or even particular insight should be required to see what is
happening in the immediate present, yet events of today are still interpreted
in such a wide variety of ways that what one analyst sees as a world-altering
event could easily be dismissed as business-as-usual by another. They say
that hindsight is 20/20, but it really isn't; different people have vastly
different views of the past, present, and future. If you doubt this at all,
just spend some time talking to a Holocaust denier, or ask a few different
economists why the Great Depression *really* happened.

It is perhaps instructive, then, that today, in the early days of 2009, an
event which most so-called computer experts are searching for in the
perhaps-not-too-distant future is an event which has already occurred,
unacknowledged by most publicly-prominent media figures.

The disappearance of the computer industry is not a future prospect. It is
not something which requires speculation. It exists in the present. It has
already happened. The question is neither if it will happen nor when it will
happen, but rather, "What do we do now that it has happened?"

A key reason why this development has gone unnoticed by so many for so long
is the tendency of image-conscious industry icons to shapeshift in endless,
desperate attempts at still appearing relevant. In big business, sometimes
marketing and PR matter more than actual money, and if you can fool most of
the people all of the time, or all of the people most of the time, then the
payoff is hoped to lie a little farther down the road. Not too much farther,
because big businesses (especially technology businesses) rarely plan
seriously for more than a few years ahead, but far enough that short-term
loss for the sake of effective image management is an acceptable loss.

Today, if you look at the names which dominate the computer industry, things
haven't changed too much from 10 years ago. You still hear a lot about
Microsoft, Intel, and Apple. Most PCs still run Windows, Linux is STILL the
upstart new operating system that's set to become the next big thing any day
now, and almost all people who use computers--both those who are computer
savvy and those who are not--worship networks in general, and the Internet in
particular, as the only real reason to have a computer, as if a non-networked
computer is about as useful as a wrench with no handle.

What nobody--certainly not the big businesses that remain in the industry,
and apparently not the computer users either--wants to acknowledge is that
the computer industry  has not had a single major innovation in the past 10
years. Sure, computers have gotten a little faster, broadband Internet access
has become somewhat more widely available, and hard drives have certainly
become larger, but none of these have significantly altered the framework of
how people use computers, for either business or personal uses. Most people
still use computers to trade e-mail, surf the web, use basic office
applications, and play games. The so-called innovations that have marked the
past decade, like the rise of blogging, so-called "social networking," and
"Web 2.0" are neither new ideas nor innovations, but simply embarrassments,
old ideas in new packages marketed as the next new thing to
computer-illiterate "experts" who gobble up these developments as the future
of the computer industry, despite the fact that they have nothing whatsoever
to do with computers.

On the hardware side of things, the only major development has been that
people are shifting to mobile phones and away from the traditional desktop
computer. In other words, people don't use computers anymore; a mobile phone,
no matter how feature-rich and networked, cannot even begin to approach an
actual computer in terms of expandability, flexibility, or solderability.
People know this and admit it openly, yet they don't really care, suggesting
that perhaps Ken Olsen was right after all when he made his famous statement,
in 1977, that "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their
home." People don't really want computers, they just want cute, shiny toys.
Ask anyone who bought the relatively new BlackBerry Storm what drew them to
the phone, and they'll happily talk about how cute the phone is, how nice the
graphics look, and how easily it slips into their pocket. People aren't quite
sure what the phone does, but it doesn't really matter as long as it looks
cute so they can continue to vomit up more verbal diarrhea about how nice the
phone looks. If people really want something small and cute that fits into
their pocket, might I suggest that a photograph of a LOLcat would probably be
cheaper and more amusing.

Back when computer engineers had a place in society, the phrase "liberal
arts" tended to have negative connotations among engineers. It immediately
brought to mind visions of people who served no practical purpose, who
studied Roman history and French art because they had nothing better to do.
Engineering, by contrast, has traditionally been seen as an eminently
practical pursuit: The path of those who build the systems that make the
world go round. Yet if computers have no practical place in society anymore,
where does the computer engineer fit in? Today, I feel like my study of
computer architecture, CPU instruction sets, and semiconductor materials is
more like the study of history than anything else. It is the study of
information that might once have been useful and relevant, but now is little
more than incidental trivia. Despite all my training and studying in computer
engineering, I feel like I might have ended up being a liberal arts major
after all.

Perhaps part of the problem is that people continue to imagine a link between
education and industry. They invent stories implying that the things a person
learns in college or university are somehow connected to the things a person
does in commercial jobs, when the reality has long been that it ain't so. Ask
any career engineer how frequently they use knowledge of calculus or
differential equations on the job; the majority don't. For centuries,
universities have taught students the essence of things, with the attitude
that such understanding was not taught to increase their employability, but
as an end in itself. Conversely, businesses don't concern themselves with
essences, but rather with profit. People sometimes say that if you're smart
and educated, you can get a good job, but this really isn't so; a business
will only employ someone if they believe that person can be profitable to
them. It has nothing to do with intelligence or education.

When you analyze the fundamental nature of the computer versus the nature of
business, you realize that they cannot work together; they are simply not
compatible. The computer is a tool to liberate and augment the mind, while
business is a tool to force or fool people into giving you money. Business
has a way of warping everything it touches. What was simple becomes
complicated when viewed through the haze of marketing plans. Simple, clear
language becomes obfuscated and misleading, twisted in such a way as to
provide maximum profit for a company.

The fundamental disconnect between business and the computer world can
clearly be observed in movements which, thankfully, have been slow in their
onset, but are nevertheless inevitable. (I use the word "movements" rather
than "trends," because these are, sadly enough, unlikely to be trends;
they're here to stay.) One of these movements is the move toward user-based
operating systems. Windows NT started this, and subsequent versions of
Windows which were based on it carried on the "new normal" of operating
systems which not only require users to log on and thus consider them just
another user account on the system, but also use file systems that associate
a list of user permissions with EVERY file on the system, turning the whole
computer into one giant police state. This makes sense on a mainframe with
several users, but what nobody seems to understand is that a home PC doesn't
need permissions, and shouldn't have them. Why would you want to lock
yourself out of your own computer? Why does your computer need to log you in
each time you want to use it, as if you were a suspicious entity whose
movements needed to be tracked? It was not so when home computers were real.
Multiuser operating systems are not appropriate for a personal computer.

Similarly, consider the thin-client movement. This is a war that's been
ongoing for many years, and it's still far from over, but basically, many
people have been touting the effectiveness and efficiency of providing all
users with stripped-down terminals that have little processing power of their
own and get all their data from a server upon which they depend for all their
data and functionality. Again, there may be some significant advantages to
this from a business perspective, because it means employers can force all
their employees to use the same data set and take away all users' computing
power, forcing them to do everything on some server that is controlled by
management. However, this same idea is utter anathema to the idea of personal
computing, in which a user owns their computer and has complete control over
all processes and data within that computer. What's good for a personal
computer user is often the utter opposite of what's good for business.

Computers can not, *should* not be mixed with business; if they are infected
with business, they lose their effectiveness at computing.

A more perfect demonstration of this concept could not be imagined than the
slow but steady decline of Apple. In 2008 and 2009, for the first time in
history, Apple computers seem poised to actually become more widely-used than
IBM PC-compatibles. This only happened when Apple made a firm commitment to
making computers as terrible as they could possibly be. It is tragic, but
also instructive, that the company that was largely responsible for creating
the personal computer industry with two of the best computers ever made--the
Apple I and the Apple II--is also the company that ended it all. The place
where it all began is the same place where it all ended. This is where it
ends: With computers designed for people who want to do inane things like
edit or watch videos. At least half of the people who own Macbooks or iPhones
could not name the mnemonic for a single opcode that is recognized by the CPU
in their Apple devices, let alone a mnemonic's hexadecimal or binary code.

Perhaps nothing can illustrate the end of the computer industry more
effectively than the rise, in 2008, of the popularity of "netbooks," small
laptop computers that weigh only one or two pounds and are almost
unimaginably inexpensive. Small handheld organizers like this have existed
for decades, but netbooks are different because they aren't just pocket
organizers. They run real operating systems and can install and run normal PC
applications. Netbooks are distinguished only by being smaller than cheaper
than other laptops. In all other respects, they are true computers,
programmable and expandable. They can perform all common tasks that people
typically do with computers, except run complex, hardware-intensive games.
Yet they are so incredibly cheap that almost anyone can afford them.

Having reached this point of universally functional and affordable computing,
I can only come to one conclusion for my computer-industry colleagues: We
both won and lost the war. We really did produce the dream that people had
been envisioning. We really made machines that can store as much real data as
most people need, connect wirelessly to a global information network, and do
it all in a way that's energy-efficient and affordable. Where, then, do we go
from here? Why would we need to do anything further? Sure, you can always
play the numbers game and make chips with more transistors, hard drives with
more bytes, and productivity applications with more useless features that no
one uses, but how long can you keep that up before people lose interest and
realize that there's no point to it anymore? If Steve Jobs had his way, he
would convince people that the answer is "Indefinitely," but he is a
businessperson, which is to say, he is a person who is paid to tell lies that
will convince other people to give him money.

We won the war, but now the war is over, and there are no positions for us
left.

Ultimately, almost any form of paid employment can be placed into 1 of 2
categories: Progress or maintenance. People with progress jobs create
progress by achieving new things. They design hardware or software, or they
write things, or even just come up with new ideas. People with maintenance
jobs don't create new things; they simply look after things and make sure
that everything is running smoothly. People who have progress jobs are, by
the very nature of their employment, in the business of making themselves
obsolete. Once their progress is complete, they either need to create
progress somewhere else, or they are no longer needed. Our progress is done;
we've created the computers people always wanted, so why would the industry
still need computer designers? That leaves maintenance people, and when
computers are so cheap that they cost more to fix than to replace,
maintenance people also become obsolete in a profit-driven environment.

Even people in the industry now admit it. There can no longer be any
realistic denial of it. Ask any person who works in the so-called "computer"
industry: In a present-day business environment, the people in the greatest
demand are not those with strong technical skills, but rather those with a
strong understanding of business principles, and some idea how computers can
be shoehorned into that framework. Incredible though it may seem, the
contemporary notion of computer people has reduced their status to join the
ranks of accountants, marketers, salespeople, managers, and the like:
"Businesspeople," the class of people who, in the absence of an
artificially-created business environment, would rightly be regarded as
having no useful skills. The "computer" industry is not populated by those
who studied calculus, electrodynamics, and signal integrity, but rather
people who think about money a lot, and whose idea of "computer literacy" is
comprised primarily of knowing how to push a mouse around on a desk and use a
search engine. (Please note that the actual minimum definition of "computer
literary" is being able to draw a schematic for a 16-bit CPU using MOSFET
symbols with no prebuilt ICs.)

It's 2009, the last year of the first decade of the new millennium, and the
computer industry has suffered a decade of steady losses. The statistical
number of people who work in the computer industry has fluctuated somewhat,
but the actual number of computer workers has gone steadily down. The
statistics are inaccurate because they tend to consider people like Java
programmers as being employed in the computer industry, even though a
programming language is not a computer and has nothing to do with computers.
Edsger Dijkstra famously said that "Computer science is no more about
computers than astronomy is about telescopes." Everybody knows it deep down
inside, they just don't want to admit it.

You may wonder why I am writing this in early 2009 instead of waiting for the
end of the year. Technically, it hasn't really been a decade yet; it's only
been 9 years. Something could still happen. Maybe between now and December,
there could still be a complete turnaround, and there might still be an
economically-useful reason to know something about computers. But it doesn't
really matter. The events that have been set in motion cannot be undone, and
any short-term reversal would only be temporary. The greatest characteristics
of the computer industry of the 1970s and 1980s--creativity, excitement,
passion, understanding, sharing, joy, and fairness--are not found in the
world of business. They have no place in a world motivated by profit and
competition. I'm writing this now, while I still have some measure of
familiarity with the pulse of the computer industry. This may well be the
last article of this nature I write. Hopefully I will move on to better
things.

To my colleagues in the field: Best wishes to all of you.