With Bill gone, and speculation about Steve’s health, does the industry know where it’s gonna go..?

I’ve been giving this one a lot of thought, and I’m certain that I’m gonna tweak the heck out of this article before the final version is posted; but I have to ask the question: with Bill gone last week and Steve’s health in question, does the computer and computing industry know where it’s going?  I’m not entirely certain.  What’s worse is I think many of us are afraid to find out…

I’m 42 years old (meaning I was born in 1965). I have grown up in the computer era.  We’ve gone from punch cards to reel tape, main frames to minis, and Commodore/Atari to today’s desktop PC’s, all in the span of my life time.  Kids…?  That really isn’t a lot of time to have come as far as we have.  What’s even more interesting, we have just a handful of people to thank for the drive and innovation that got us here.  Two of them are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

I’m not going to go through what each man has accomplished in the course of their careers.  If you want to see stuff like that, take a trip to C-Net or ZDNet, and then come back. I’m certain they have articles that do that kind of chronological dance down memory lane. We’re going to see articles like that ad-nauseam.  What I’m more interested in and concerned about is the future of computing now that the Era is ending.

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This summer there will be a new cut-down and ultra portable laptop and this one is perceived as an Eee killer: the Wind NoteBook. With the availability of chips by VIA and Intel for low cost and less hungry devices and the ambitious work of OLPC with the XO and Asus’ Eee; low priced and lightweight devices have stormed the computing world and are sounding the drums of change. Indeed, it is expected that by next year, laptop sales will overtake desktops and mark the real shift (no pun intended to HTC). Cut-down devices are like a sprouting branch of the laptop market and with excited consumers, manufacturers are on fire. Asus success with the Eee has inspired other manufacturers to offer their own devices to compete in the growing market. Dell has recently announced that they will also launch a “netbook” of their own.

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This is definitely a moment in OLPC’s history of big changes as views are conflicting on what the mission should really be about. This week, we have two important announcements: Microsoft is officially pushing Windows XP into the XO and Sugar Labs is no longer dedicated to the XO but will now offer the possibilities of building a “learning ecosystem” on all platforms.

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