OPEN SOURCE AND THE FUTURE OF PERSONAL COMPUTING
Benjamin Kaiser
WHO are the market leaders?
Apple
MicrosoftWhat all these companies have in common is that they have a different operating system for Phones, Tablets, PCs and in some cases TVs.
EMERGING TREND
As new players from the open-source community emerge, they will be able to set some trends existing companies have avoided.
The key trend identified is using one device to serve the purpose of multiple devices with a single operating system. This is labelled as full device convergence by Canonical (2013).
In other words, having a single operating system that runs on one device that can take multiple form factors depending on the peripherals it is attached too.
Who is bringing it to market
Canonical is one of the largest companies in the open-source community and they have announced they will be bringing their popular operating system (Ubuntu) to mobile devices along with allowing it to be used across all form factors (including Phone, Tablet, PC and TV).
WHAT WILL IT LOOK LIKE
The initial release will come in the form of several mobile phone models that will ship with this convergent OS installed. The high end devices will allow for docking to a monitor and keyboard and support the full Ubuntu Desktop.
WHY CANONICAL AND OPEN-SOURCE
In the past, economic reasons have stopped current competitors from bringing such a product to market.
Canonical is new to the market and has the power to revolutionise the industry.
Due to the fact that it is a competitive environment, if Canonical manages to gain traction, existing competitors will be forced to bring their own solutions to market or risk falling behind.
WEISER'S LITERATURE
Weiser's article titled 'Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing' (1993) expresses that computers will eventually always be around us, but will be so intuitive that they seem almost invisible.
Gaps:
- What user experience is needed for devices to be so intuitive they become invisible?
- Why spread our computing power so widely when we can have it all one a single device that performs the majority of our daily tasks.
SINGLE DEVICE, MUltiple uses
Rather than have multiple separate devices around us, Canonical's strategy is to have one device with several different peripherals (TV dock, PC Dock, etc) serve our needs. This reduces the redundancy of having multiple unused devices at any point in time by keeping all their resources in one device. This both reduces costs and keeps everything in one place
The important task when building this device with full convergence is to create an experience that feels the same across all form factors. The importance of a unified experience is presented by Galitz (2002) in his book on essential user interface design.
WHY DO WE NEED A CONVERGED DEVICE?
- Reduce the need for syncing services between all our different devices. This will both slow the high number of Internet connected devices (NPD Group 2013) as well as free up large amounts of Internet bandwidth.
- Consistent user experience, see (Galitz 2002).
- Cheaper costs.
- Ease of use (easy to move our current workflow at a PC to our phone).
SUMMARY
- Full device convergence is coming in the near future from Canonical in the form of a mobile phone that is convergent across all form factors.
- Canonical is bringing this change because they can be aggressive in their strategy to move into hardware. Being open source their views are more aligned with the community than that of a company such as Apple highly driven by stockholders and profit.
- The responsibility of a device with full convergence is to deliver a consistent user experience across all form factors.
Resources
Please see my academic report for more details and a full list of references.
a1 presentation for cis310
By Benjamin Kaiser
a1 presentation for cis310
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