Under the Wire: Old news

OPINION: Am I the only person who felt a bit, can I say it, let down by the three major US technology Expos this year? Somehow all three lacked a certain ‘newness’ — to my jaded mind at least.

I’m referring to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, and the Detroit Motor Show in...

Highlight of the CES was Bill Gates showing off the features of Windows Vista. Pretty much the same demo he gave last year, but lacking the word ‘Longhorn’. So the past 12 months have seen Microsoft’s flagship product no longer a cow. Progress, I suppose.

At San Francisco, Steve Jobs unveiled the Intel-based Macs he announced six months ago in — hey, San Francisco. For all we know he’s been standing in the one spot since June, waiting for the engineering team to catch up with the guy who prepares his keynote presentations.

Between what we’d already been told and what had solidly been rumoured, the only real surprise out of Macworld was Apple’s decision to ditch the name ‘PowerBook’ — arguably the best-known brand in portable computers — with ‘MacBook’.To my ear, MacBook is the kind of name you might throw around the boardroom until someone comes up with a better idea, like PowerBook.

Meanwhile in Detroit, the highlight was the unveiling of the 2007 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500. For those of you who may not be keen motoring enthusiasts, this is the same designation given to a Mustang that Ford introduced in 1967. The new one looks pretty much exactly like the 1967 version. More powerful, of course, but I think it says something for a technology company (and Ford is, most assuredly, a technology company) when the highlight of your main annual unveiling is a nostalgic extravagance.

It’s as if Ford is saying ‘we’ve kind of run out of ideas here. The cars are as fast and powerful as we can make them, so the only way we can innovate and keep you coming back is to remind you of the clever stuff we used to do 40 years ago’.

Microsoft and Apple seem to be taking similar tacks (though neither of them has 40 years of nostalgia to draw upon). Apple’s switch to Intel was driven by the realisation that the PowerPC road was a cul de sac, albeit a pleasant one. The new laptop, which should have been Apple’s crowning achievement — stepping yet again far ahead of the industry — is instead seen as Apple’s first attempt to make a machine like everyone else makes. Why try to make it a surprise?

And Microsoft, which seems to have been promising the features in Vista since before it was promising Windows95, has the rare distinction of being a market leader and an also-ran at the same time.

My mum took the attitude that technology was supposed to be about answering people’s needs, helping them do stuff they needed to do, and do it better than they could without the technology. I’d tell her about some new and exciting thing I’d seen unveiled, and she’d ask me who needs such a thing — what need does it fill? She helped me keep perspective.

Apple and Microsoft’s announcements, cool though both were in their ways, wouldn’t have impressed her. She’d have liked the Mustang though.

Vale, Janet Powell 2.8.1944–31.12.2005.