Should Microsoft Be Worried?
Years ago my dad bought an electric drill. It came with a jigsaw attachment, a sander attachment, a circular saw attachment and a polisher attachment. You were supposed to fit the required add-on to the drill when you wanted it to fill that role. Of course this was a pain and nowadays, because the price of electric motors for drills has dropped, you by a complete sander or saw or whatever.
I was reminded of this a bit when I bought my latest gadget. It is a printer from HP, the Photosmart 245. This printer has a dinky colour screen and sockets for memory cards. You plug in the card from you camera, select the picture, zoom in and frame if you like and then press the print button. The prints look great. And Panasonic have just launched a camera which does automatic red eye removal (and probably lots of other things as well).
The way things are going you can now do digital photography without the aid of a computer. It seems that rather than use one jack of all trades to do various jobs, there could be a tendency for the devices themselves to take on individual roles.
So, where does this leave the personal computer? It does all manner of tasks with various software attachments. But will we eventually see all the jobs that it does subsumed into other devices? Will we have printers that word process, screens that are browsers and so on? And if so, where would Microsoft fit into all this? And should they be worried?