The Story I Can’t Cover

One reason I spend too much time on politics and other trivia is that my tech beat is closed.

I can’t cover the biggest technology story of our time.

That is the story of the Next Great Interface, the Laptop Replacement.

It’s closed to me because mobile carriers in the U.S. insist on their networks being closed, so change only happens there as quickly as their bureaucracies move. They see bits as services and demand payment for every file, which makes usage costs unreasonable. And WiFi doesn’t have the coverage area (yet) to stimulate the discussion.

The Laptop Replacement will mainly be a set of interfaces, with storage. It would make sense if it were based on Linux, with XML support. That would accelerate development by bringing the economics of open source to the party.

It would look like a phone, or maybe a Blackberry. It would allow seamless connections not just to your desktop, but to your home network. For a consumer this might mean their ISP and their personal Web site files, as well as their home. For a business this would mean their business network.

Security and audit trails would be integral to this device. Businesses would want it first, and they would need to track permissions for file downloads.

Among the inputs would be biometrics, again to authenticate usage of network files and resources. In time a voice input to the network would be nice. This would double the security and make the whole thing easier to use.

You would tell this device, in some way, what files you wanted, in what order, and it would get those files over the Internet for you, in the background, letting you know when they were available. Then, once you arrived at your destination, you would dock the device and the files (a sales presentation, say) would be displayed on whatever machine you’re connected to.

We can’t work on this here because we lack the fat pipes necessary, and the open permissions for users necessary, to make this work. But such pipes exist in Korea and Japan and China, and there the work is ongoing.

Already, in these countries, most people carry mobile devices with them rather than laptops. Laptops have become desktops, and phones have become laptops. So it’s merely a task of increasing the capability of the phone so it can access the desktop resources, and the network resources that desktop is connected to.

Once the phone is working in the business market, moreover, there is an enormous stimulant for Always On applications – home inventory, home automation, home security. A GPS add-on to the phone is a natural, too.

We’re really less than a decade away from a combination Star Trek Tricorder-Communicator, with nearly the same size and close to the same interfaces (voice). 

But Americans can’t touch this story because we lack the infrastructure. We lack the infrastructure because the Bells and cable operators are hoarding the bits. They are hoarding the bits because they are monopolists, and our political leaders don’t see that monopoly is not capitalist, but fascist.

By the time we get this straightened out we’ll be so far behind it won’t be funny. I just hope we have enough imagination to take advantage of what the East gives us.