What next?

I always enjoy trying to predict the future. And naturally I fail, because even the ones who invent the future can't predict it. Still I enjoy doing it.

If I look at the history of computing there are two major trends; the longer one is the wave from central computers to personal computers and back, the second is the permanent move to increasing mobility, from mainframes to minis and then to PCs, laptops, notebooks, tablets and smart-phones. 

Central - personal

    In the first trend once there were computers filling large rooms and requiring trained personal to run them, then terminals arrived which got programmable and evolving into personal computers. The story than is well known, soon PCs were to be find everywhere, often replacing mainframes and minicomputers, than the area of mobility began starting with laptops then moving to notebooks, tablets and smart-phones. The Internet led to centralization again moving more and more processing to servers and after cloud computing and HTML5 arrived we were back again on track towards centralized computing. 

    I thought for quite a while that pear to pear computing will be the winner where everybody could set up a configure a small virtual computer on her computer which uses the idle power and is part of a cloud doing processing for others exactly the same way cloud computing does. It didn't happen probably because of the complexity and the lack of an appropriate business model. Or the open source community couldn't find a good solution.

   It happened otherwise and smart-phones and tablets are reinventing the old PC although cleverly combined with Internet services and - yes - maybe with pear to pear solutions. 

    My guess is that there will be a revival of personal computer we will have computing devices in our living room and at our desks. Probably we - the older generation? - will call it Television.  

Mobility

   The second trends is strongly overlapping with the first one and it's a trend towards mobility. However something interesting is happening there; as telephones start to replace computers they start to grow. Even the iPhone has a larger 4" screen but others are even larger.  There is something wrong, for a phone it's to large, for a computer to small. 

   To go on with mobility we have to break with the traditional view of computer. Our computer will go totally virtual and shared about plenty of devices which will include your car, phone, television, desktop computer and any device you may to use. The most frequently used will be wearable computers which are practically invisible ant controlled by voice and gestures. (Could I have an iPod shuffle sized mobile phone with Siri interface?) However if you sit in your car, in the front of the TV or at your desk(top) your virtual computer will "follow you" and - although through a different interface - will give you access to the same data, information, music, applications you have used before at any device e.g. on an eBook reader. 

Yes it means you have to synchronize over the cloud, which is not a big deal in my opinion. P2P hasn't caught on you know...