Keyboard (Jeff)
JohnH201@aol.com
XXX, 27 Aug 1993 19:25:19 -0400 (EDT)
May I point out,
In addition to GW Dudley's post concerning the hardware aspect of the
computer history there is also the software part and it goes just about the
same. A lot of big players in the mainframe software market didn't, or just
barely, make it to the PC software market.
What does this mean for PDA's? It means the current biggies in the
desktop PC software market aren't jumping into the PDA software market
(except for GeoWorks and Apple). There will be a new batch of 'visionary'
software developers that grow with the PDA markets. So, for example, if
you're looking for WordPerfect for your PDA it ain't going to happen. They
have their cards on the desktop PC market and aren't looking at PDA's. In a
couple of years PDAs will have the memory and harddisk space to fit the
WordPerfect product (if they don't keep growing it). But by then some smaller
more adventurous company will have already 'wrapped up' the PDA wordprocessor
market on the way to becoming bigger then WordPerfect because the PDA market
is much larger.
It's going to be very interesting to see if and when the 'biggies'
suddenly decide that they *need* to play in the PDA market. Will they decide
to get in early and maybe lose some desktop PC share to be in the PDA market
establishing a presence early? Or will they wait until more people have PDAs
then desktop PCs to start converting their developement to PDAs and try to
musle out the players that have been there and entrenced from the begining?
Or just let it go and stay with desktop PCs?
JohnH201