OS Compatibility vs. Cloud Computing: Why PCs Need a Greates
Source: Henry Festa
Because the cloud is the public wild west devolution of the Internet or simply a new way to lose more privacy with less control of or safety for your information, the greatest hits of computing shall forever remain in the past just as it does with pop culture, movies, TV and music. This is a good and bad thing since although our online experience will be molded by the monolithic nature of the cloud, the value of good old days hardware and classic media software no longer produced will skyrocket and become an expensive priceless novelty. All this just so PCs can be made impersonal for cyberspace gatekeepers.
In the tech business, reinvention is the lifeblood of product turnover. You can't get consumers locked in with a favorite operating system before you are forced to plan obsolescence to get them to buy something new. But if new is just different, ill quality control defined or does not present enough productivity improvement or variety of end user choice, then the process amounts to a desperate effort to pad the corporate bottom line. In the PC industry, which has moved from home tower hardware to online cloud ubiquity, those imagining the future too quick have slowly lost sight of the gold mine of the past.
While there are PCs of every shape, size and function from gaming rigs to social media gadgets, to date there has not been a super computer that includes all systems in one. Or PC's greatest hits if you will. No work station with all the operating systems that allows computing to be timeless rather than dated. If a leading tech retailer were to conceive of such a machine instead of the usual backtrack marketing devices for in house sales, no software or game would ever be out of style. And their perpetually in vogue inventory would not have to constantly rely on what's new to be competitive.
Using the music biz as an example, the concept of greatest hits is often a nostalgic consumer campaign for endless enduring sales. The best selling music CD of all time was once said to be an Eagles Greatest Hits compilation from the 70s. In a world of collectors who are often loyal to products that remind them of their youth, nostalgia never gets old. If some PC software, peripheral or accessory was better in the past than the present, why not enable it to be sold and utilized into perpetuity? In modern hit or miss tech, sole reliance on the drumbeat of newness may one day be a thing of the past.
Since the progression of Moore's law is constant, processing speed and storage space have grown by leaps and bounds and computing benchmarks are now measured in 5K plus MHz and terabytes. So an all-systems-go rig from DOS command lines to the mobilization of Windows is within the realm of possibility. With OS hard drives reserved and not partitioned, this would be an expensive home based PC at first. But it would be better than smartphone/tablet gadgets tethered to the cloud for virtual intangibles instead of online shopping for concrete box store goods and services.
If a cyber retail titan like Amazon or Ebay helped develop the ultimate computer instead of toy gadgets or apps for kids, every software item on their list from from rarest E publishing suite to the most obscure game title would all of a sudden have an infinite market afterlife tie-in. And every technophile worth their weight in geekdom would want this product as the only PC answer to the impossible dream of universal compatibility. Such a product proposition would allow niche computer fans retro access and create a whole new market to standardize hardware the same way the cloud does software.
Go off the grid and produce your own power supply and PC tech that does not rely on the cloud will function best. Moreover, research studies on digital consumerism show that the ethereal nature of the web makes for transient product identification and does not equate traditional brand loyalty. That is because something you own in cyberspace is not valued as much as something you can feel and touch in a classic media format. On the contrary, the cloud owns you. And selling out hands on electronics in the digital age is like trading in souls without bodies or brains without minds.
To reason a fair share of tech options for new age PC start-ups is not to take a Luddite stance. What it is is a plea for the PC to be the home productivity center it once was and not a forced funnel for 24/7 social media excess. In face of untapped alternatives, tech conditioning that supports ongoing hardware/software divestment won't be able to totally get rid of the need of consumers to buy material goods possessed the old fashioned way. That's why the PC needs a greatest hits machine to balance tech advancements since lemming computing for most is much too tenuous to be progressive for all.
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