Peter's Technology Trumpet

After years in the wilderness, is it cool to be a PC again?

In 2006 Apple’s Mac adverts cast the PC as an anachronism contrasting David Mitchell’s bumbling and confused PC user with Robert Webb’s tousle-haired trendy young Mac dude .

Some 3 years later, the middle-aged Windows PC has lost a few pounds and found its clothes have come back in fashion – re-invigorated by Windows 7 and some trick hardware.

Mainstream and IT media have reached consensus that Windows 7 is a good thing -  fast, thrifty and more in keeping with Austerity Britain than the bourgeois Apple MacBook Air with its thoroughbred Snow Leopard.

Speed, responsiveness and efficiency have a lot to do with it. From consumers point of view, Windows 7 is a leap forward, running like a train on cheaper, less powerful NetBook hardware. And the view from Waverley Towers shows many Scottish enterprises that struggled to run Vista on existing PCs now planning their Windows 7 rollouts.

Following the sustained engineering effort to prepare Windows 7 for launch on October 22nd, Microsoft’s marketers have cottoned on to the  austerity vibe with “The New Efficiency” tagline, a theme adopted for Microsoft Scotland’s launch event on November 24th.

But marketing millions and flashy ads alone can’t make a device an object of technological desire. It has to perform reliably, have aesthetic appeal, and work really intuitively. And it helps if it is small and black.

Clearly the “too cool for school” award of the recent past goes to the Apple iPhone and wider family of touch devices. Its success in part must go the highly tactile means of interaction – using a “multitouch” display. The device can be driven by “human” gestures like pinching, swiping, rotating, dragging through support for multiple simultaneous finger touchpoints.

Its on-board accelerometer allowing tilting and shaking gestures also adds to the appeal, and enabled the No.1 mission critical enterprise iPhone iBeer “pretending to drink a pint of lager” application.

Meanwhile in the Personal Computer marketplace, gesture based computing and multitouch is about to enter the mainstream. All major PC manufacturers including HP, Lenovo, DELL and Acer have recently launched multitouch PCs. Shortly after driving an enabled application you will agree with the industry pundits who predict multitouch will dominate in higher end laptops and consumer scenarios within the next few years.

Multitouch could make the PC more acceptable and easier to use in many situations – for example in hospitals, point of sale, and in the home. It can also make computing more accessible people who struggle with it today such as the elderly, younger kids, or communities with language comprehension issues. Numerous applications benefit from this – notably anything involving graphics and media, spatial or geographic data – but in fact anything which involves navigating through lots of data.

Clearly all this is made possible by display innovations,  OS engineering and software developers toolkits which can marry higher screen resolutions and “dots per inch” to the kind of gestures driven by peoples fat fingers.

Research in multitouch dates back to the early 80’s. In 2001 Microsoft envisaged started development of the Surface device – essentially a computer embedded in a table with a large, flat, touch responsive display. This does away with mouse and keyboard, and provides a tabletop that can interact with people and objects.

The crowd-stopping impact of this device was demonstrated last September when the First Minister Alex Salmond opened Waverley Towers – that’s Raymond O’Hare girning on the left. More recently we saw its power to impress at Aberdeen’s Offshore Europe conference this September.

Offshore Europe is a strange event to those not stepped in Oil & Gas. About 50,000 people gather from around the world to ogle at heavy machinery, safety equipment, and helicopters in a tent on a car park at the Aberdeen International Conference Centre.

But the big drills were put in the shade by software development company Codify, who used Surface to navigate the North Sea – an application which they developed with Petroleum operations company AGR. This demonstrated the visualisation of hydrocarbon fields and well data, and had amazed well engineers zooming in to view levels of detail such as depth and completion status of wells, all with a brush of the hand.

Companies and individuals, such as Codify’s MD Mark Griffith,  who can harness this kind of innovation may yet make the PC cool again…

Microsoft continue to drive the cool agenda with some marketing dollars: Seth Rogen, the creator of “Family Guy” is producing a special episode devoted to Windows 7 on November 8th. Though this is unlikely to reach the UK because of our stricter product placement guidelines, undoubtedly it will be viewable via the Internet shortly afterwards.