SoftCards, and the “PC” future

A few people see the “tablet” as the future of computing. I see it as the future of the “content consumption”. Those watching movies, playing games, or reading news, will find it extremely comfortable to hold on to a tablet, phone or equivalent device while riding the bus. Mainly when, soon, they won’t need to hold anything.

Those of us in the area of “content creation”, be it those making software, games, video, or any other of kind of “intellectual property”, know that it is still hard to beat the productivity of the old keyboard. Today, those of us creating content are stuck with an eternal cycle of updates. That deserves its own post. But there is something worse: installing and trying applications that somehow damage the configuration of your machine. In theory, you can get back to a “restore point”, or a backup. In practice, that is harder than it looks. Even I, having different partitions for “applications” and “data” in most of my machines, can hardly keep all of them working and up-to-date, while avoiding losing data due to some erroneous backup (and not going into the topic of malware, viruses, etc.).

At times, I do “give up”, and just reinstall my “applications” partition. That is not a small task. It requires reinstalling Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio, Bitlocker, Windows Home Server client, Dropbox, Windows Live Essentials + Live Mesh/Sync, Adobe "things" (PDF reader, Flash, etc.), 1Password, Apple things (iTunes, Quicktime, etc.) , Zune (for the Windows Phone 7 software), Kindle reader, and the printer and other device drivers. And since I typically use a MacBook Pro as my machine – because I need metal-based hardware” to resist my clumsiness – add to that the BootCamp drivers and a few more work on the Mac OS side.

Most of the current software updates don’t add anything to application functionality, and just fix newly uncovered security holes. Would I need those if my software was in a “read only” partition? No. Why not make computers work just like the video-games, having software cards that come with pre-installed packages of software, and cannot be contaminated by malware during the normal usage? I would gladly buy a “Developer 2011” card with the applications that I need installed today. I could then use that for a couple of years, and update later to the “Developer 2013” card when it makes sense for me. Computers would have a few slots for such cards, which could have the size of a credit card and be carried in your pocket from place to place, instead of an entire computer. A “data card” would be used to carry the partition with the data that needs to be local, while most of a user’s data would be where it is already going to be soon anyway: the cloud!

The first hardware vendor to move on to such scenario will definitely get a lot of “early adopters”, and I’ll certainly be among the first.