The November 12, 2007, edition of Time magazine has a special section, The Tech Buyer’s Guide. It lists a number of fascinating gadgets and products.
Here are a list of some of them. I picked these since each meets one of the following conditions:
- It demonstrates the relentless advance of such basic technology as chip size or hard disk size;
- It is a small device that contains software in some form;
- It is software;
- It tickled my fancy.
A Robot You Can Relate To: Domo
Weed ‘Em and Reap: HortiBot
Making the Car Chase Obsolete: StarChase Pursuit Management System
Good Morning, Sunshine: glo Pillow
The $1,000 Football Helmet: HTS helmet
Sound Tracker: Portable People Meter
An ATM for Books: Espresso Book Machine
Size Matters: 45-nanometer core processor
The Hard Drive: “This year Hitachi released the first ever 1-terabyte hard drive, the Deskstar 7K1000.”
The $150 Laptop: XO Laptop
Blood Simple: way to convert other blood types to O
Take a Walk: Google Map’s Street View
Cheap: RCA EZ201 Small Wonder
Talk is Cheap: Palm Centro
Bag Some Rays: Eclipse Fusion laptop bag, Solio Hybrid 1000, HYmini
Cheap: Creative Zen Stone Plus, Samsung P2
Net Worth: Linksys dual-band wireless router: Belkin N1 Vision
Loosey Goosey: Clique Hue HD
Good Call: Netgear SPH200W Wi-Fi phone
Back It Up: Iomega eGo portable hard drive
Desktop Computer: Zonbu
I hadn’t heard of most of these gadgets, and I expect I’ll be buying at least a few of them. I do know I have already signed up to buy an XO Laptop, the “OLPC” (One Laptop Per Child) computer.
If you are just looking for neat new gadgets then you can move on now, for the rest of this post is for a different audience.
If you aren’t a software developer then can leave now, though you might want to hang around if you have any interest in Linux,open-source and free software, or want to see some keen insight and great writing.
Ok, fellow programmers. Go learn more about some of these gadgets. You will find that most of them contain software in some form.
Now pick a couple of them, and ask yourself the following questions:
- If you were a lead developer for the company producing the gadget, one of the programmers who would be writing the code that your company would rely on, is there a compelling reason that requires you use Windows to develop and deploy that code?
- If there weren’t any known solution available, which SDK would you pick to develop the code: The GNU/Linux SDK or the Windows SDK?
- Are there any licensing costs that require you pay a certain amount for each gadget your company produces?
Can you think of similar questions I haven’t listed here? I bet you can.
I draw several lessons from the list of gadgets and hacks:
- Software is inexorably moving to the web, leaving the traditional client/server model behind.
- The desktop/laptop is giving way to the special-purpose appliance, what we programmers call an “embedded device.”
- Much software is also inexorably moving into these embedded devices:
- The Linux SDK for such embedded devices is the best available, and also has both low acquisition cost and a small form factor.
I’m damn glad I don’t work for Microsoft’s Strategy Department, because I can’t think of a strategy to counter this changing software universe other than an extended retreat in strength based on press releases and litigation.
Can you?