The next decade will be about deconvergence. Perhaps you still have a PC in your den that can browse the web, play music, watch videos that you downloaded off of iTunes and myriad other PCish activities. However, that device will be far less important than it is now, or than it has been in the last 10 years. The idea of using your main PC for everything will fade as smaller, more specialized devices take over and cannibalize the attention that this big, expensive box receives.

Since trading my Treo in for an iPhone, my use of my laptop has greatly diminished. Since getting my laptop, my use of my desktop has greatly diminished. The idea here is that, like just about anyone, my main use for a computer is browsing the web and reading emails. When I got my laptop, no longer was it necessary to be chained to a seat in my room in order to read my websites. It was replaced by sitting on the couch in my living room, where I was able to browse the web without being secluded in a den. Email was similar — the iPhone handles Gmail admirably, so in the same vein, no longer did I have to be chained to a laptop [or desktop] to check my messages — instead, I just clicked on the mail icon on my phone, and there they were.

The exciting thing next on the horizon is small devices that don’t do it all, but do one thing really well, and do it in the most ideal location. I can easily imagine a kitchen device that does little more than email, recipe database, and a basic web browser. Want to write a paper? Too bad, can’t do it here. Want to play a video game? Nope. However, what you do want is basically a kiosk that makes it dead-simple to look up a recipe or follow up on an email with grandma, and this machine does it perfectly. Of course, the price point is important too — however, since the hardware requirements will be extremely modest since we won’t be storing large files or running lots of apps, we can get away with very basic hardware. Eventually, things like these will sell in the $100-150 range, and thats where we get critical mass. Devices like this do exist (the 3M Audrey was perhaps the first, and others have come and gone), but haven’t caught on, probably due to a high price point, poor or nonexistent marketing, and overly complicated or overly simplistic feature sets.

Similar equipment will come for the home stereo and theatre. AppleTV, which has [regrettably] gone largely unnoticed, is a very good first effort at this. Plug the $300 device into your home theater, and you can buy TV shows or movies from the iTunes store and easily watch them on the big screen. Pictures and music stream from your base computer as well. The next step improvement on this is the Roku Netflix Player, which streams 15,000 titles from Netflix into your home. It costs $100, which is barely more than a decent DVD player.

Why haven’t these devices fully caught on yet? For one, people just aren’t really used to getting their television content from a computer. Its still easier to tune into ABC at 7:00 on a Monday night to watch a TV show. Music has all but entirely transitioned to the web and to iTunes (and its better competitor, Amazon Music Store), thanks largely to Apple and the iPod. TV won’t be far behind, but will certainly take a bit more to get there.

Three things stand in the way: the first is simply society — people have to get used to getting off their main computer and allowing satellite devices to take the place for some activities. At this point, a lot of people simply aren’t thinking about how they could link up their computer to their home system and achieve a sort of media nirvana that doesn’t exist right now. DVDs are on their way out, and even BlueRay won’t be the next thing — forget physical disks, its all coming into your house through your internet connection. But it will take some time for basic home users to associate computing and home entertainment, and for the time being, its the job of the early-adopters to spread the word about this killer union.

Second is the price point. Many of the home devices try to be too much, or end up using hardware that is overkill for the most basic purposes that they will be used for. Others just haven’t hit the sweet spot where the price of the hardware and the market-clearing price of the unit have come into alignment. It will, though, and I think this zone, if not upon us, is closer than we think.

Finally, there are still technical barriers. Killer embedded systems will never run Windows or Mac OSX. These operating systems are designed for hub PCs, not for tiny devices running on a basic microchip. A fledgling startup, the kind of company that could likely hit this idea on the head, can’t easily strip down Windows to the point where it runs efficiently on the most basic of systems. Linux is perfectly suited for this, since you can take out all of the excess and leave just the basics, which I see as a kernel, some display drivers, perhaps some sound drivers, some networking, and a few services on top of that to handle communications with other computers in the home. Perhaps a generic server can power your kitchen device, your AV device and your bedroom web-browsing device. DRM is poison to the process, so hopefully the nascent push out of DRM will continue and spread to video content as well as audio content.

My vision of the future? Technology won’t be something you sit down at a desk to access — instead, it will be something that surrounds you and assists everywhere you go. The web isn’t something you open a browser to get on, but rather, the backbone for a dozen of your daily activities, without you even realizing it.

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I took a look, and the issue isn’t really the computer itself so much as the 4+ years of application buildup slowing down the machine and a new version of OSX (upgraded to Tiger from I believe OS X 10.2) which undoubtedly eats up more cycles than 10.2.  If I spent a few hours uninstalling and cleaning, or worse, reformatting, I could definitely speed it up dramatically…but why?

What she and millions of other PCs sitting in dens, kitchens and family rooms around the world need is an extremely stripped down OS which would run only the barest of basics — in her case, it would be only Firefox, since she gets her emails though gmail. Conceivably, the 1% of other stuff that she does could be handled though another, more fully functioning computer.

What is needed here, and what I hope to build at some point given a bit more time to play around with the stuff, is a bare bones LiveCD that loads itself fully into memory and provides only a browser in an attractive and friendly format. I know there are distros like Damn Small Linux and others that begin down this road, but even those are too much for what I envision — a sort of set-top box for the internet. It needs to look decent (I installed a Ubuntu LiveCD and her first comment was ‘eww, whats that ugly brown color on my desktop’) and be completely free of other icon clutter — no dock, maybe a basic clock, no desktop icons, no media players, no email clients, etc. Finally, the icing on the cake would be this — you plug in a flash drive, and that becomes your home directory. Again, this is something other distro’s have attempted, but none have perfected (that I know). The way this would work is as follows: plug in the flash drive, boot up linux. On the first boot, if the flash drive isn’t formatted as ext3, give the option to format (this is dangerous because you would have to be sure its not a hard drive with Windows and data on it, but that can be surmounted). On subsequent boots, the /home/username structure would exist, and all Firefox settings and preferences would be saved to the flash drive.

The best thing about this would be that the volatile aspect of the OS would mean that a fresh, fast computer is never further than a reboot away. If the window manager was something very lightweight (XFCE, etc…or even Ratpoison started up with Firefox maximized…hmmmmm), it could run very well on even the oldest of hardware. People that don’t use computers often wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the system, kids could use it without corrupting anyone’s data (since everything would be on a flash drive anyways) and geeks like me could enjoy Thanksgiving without having to perform a brain transplant on an aging iMac.

Interested to hear if anyone has made more progress on this than I’ve seen…