VideoThe desktop metaphor is collapsing under the weight of data overload, says Tim Brown, the boss of IDEO, a design firm in Silicon Valley. "Browsing in the old sense of the word becomes pointless," he says, and "filtering becomes crucial." This applies both to items that are stored on the user's PC and to those on the internet because, in an always-on world, the distinction becomes irrelevant.
Hence the excitement about Google. Its algorithms have so far been directed only at websites, but it plans to deploy its search technology to help people find their own documents as well. Google is currently soft-launching Gmail, a free e-mail service that offers one gigabyte of free storage. This could be a first step towards letting customers store all their data on Google's servers, where they will be easily searchable, instead of on their own PCs. In a parallel move, earlier this month Google offered free software that searches the local hard disks of PC users and displays the results much like those of a web search.
Naturally, this has struck fear into Microsoft, whose Windows system runs 94% of the world's PCs and which sees itself as the ruler of the desktop. Yet Microsoft understands the threat that data overload poses to Windows' current metaphors. Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and software boss, regards this interface crisis as one of the biggest challenges for his firm, alongside the security holes in Windows and, perhaps, the threat from Linux, an open-source operating system.
His plan was therefore to introduce new metaphors in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. Instead of files and folders, it would use fancy new search algorithms to guide users through their PC. This technology, called WinFS (which stands either for "file system" or "future storage"), was to turn Longhorn into relational databases so that users would no longer need to remember where they put things, because the interface would automatically retrieve data for them as needed. Alas, in August Microsoft announced that Longhorn would be delayed until 2006 and that its gem, WinFS, had been dropped from it altogether. Gleefully, rivals now refer to Longhorn as either Longwait or Shorthorn.
Honey, We Need to Talk
Even the mockingbirds, however, cannot agree on what metaphor should
replace the desktop. One favorite seems to be some kind of "personal
assistant". But that may be promising too much, because what makes
real-life assistants helpful is that they are able to make sense of
their bosses' inchoate ramblings. In computing, says Microsoft's Mr
Breese, "the holy grail of simplicity is
I-just-wanna-talk-to-my-computer", so that the computer can "anticipate
my needs". The technical term for this is speech recognition. "Speech
makes the screen deeper," says X.D. Huang, Microsoft's expert on the
subject. "Instead of a limited drop-down menu, thousands of functions
can be brought to the foreground."
The only problem is that the idea is almost certainly unworkable. People confuse speech recognition with language understanding, argues Mr. Norman. But to achieve language understanding, you first have to crack the problem of artificial intelligence (AI), which has eluded scientists for half a century. In fact, the challenge goes beyond AI, according to Mr. Norman, and to the heart of semantics. Just think how difficult it would be to teach somebody to tie a shoelace or to fold an origami object by using words alone, without a diagram or a demonstration. "What we imagine systems of speech-understanding to be is really mind-reading," says Mr. Norman. "And not just mind-reading of thoughts, but of perfect thoughts, of solutions to problems that don't yet exist." The idea that speech recognition is the key to simplicity, Mr. Norman says, is therefore "just plain silly".
He concludes that the only way to achieve simplicity is to have gadgets that explicitly and proudly do less (he calls these "information appliances"). Arguably, the iPod proves him right. Its success so far stems from its relative modesty of ambition: it plays songs but does little else. In the same vein, other vendors, such as Sun Microsystems, have for years been promoting radically stripped-down devices called "network computers" or "thin clients" that do nothing but access the internet, where the real action is. Such talk horrifies firms such as Microsoft, whose financial fortunes rely on clients getting thicker so that they can sell software upgrades. But in the end the minimalists may be proved right.
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