May 24,2012

We don't always realise it, for it is not as obvious or striking as in the clothing or haute couture industry but fashion is everywhere in the field of consumers electronics, more particularly when it comes to personal computing. And like any fashion it comes and goes.

Touch screens, voice activation, colourful laptops (ah, those incredible Dell laptops with their catchy dark red top...) and countless computer formats may be mere fads. From the purely technical or scientific viewpoint nothing says that this is the way it has to be or that this is the best way to interact with the machine, but this is what makes you want to have it. Until of course manufacturers change their mind and introduce something else, or revert to an old design, making it fashion again!

Like with any industry, manufacturers of computers, smartphones and the like constantly need to find new selling points. Pushing sales by bragging about faster, more powerful machines used to be enough. Now it is not anymore. The looks and the external design have become as important as the actual performance if not more, for now even entry-level equipment sports countless features and good performance, relegating this aspect to the background.

Fashion hardly stops at the way the machine looks physically, but goes all the way to how the screen contents are displayed. Look at any website which design has not been modified for one year or more and you will immediately get this old-fashioned feeling.

In an interesting twist Microsoft's people seem to have abandoned the "Aero" screen style in their new Windows 8 system that is expected to be officially released by year end. Aero was introduced in Windows Vista and is still used in the current Windows 7. It is a form of graphic enhancement that uses subtle shades, transparency and mirror-like images. We were always told by the company that Aero is the way to go and that it is a most pleasant form of screen style or UI (User Interface).

Now we are told that the UI of Windows 8, without Aero, is clearer, easier on the eye, more streamlined and puts less stress on the graphic resources of the processor. If this is not whimsical fashion then what is?

Back to touch screens. Even if most users seem to have adopted the technology, at least in smartphones, many still find the traditional press-button way to be easier, more reliable and providing a more comfortable tactile feedback. How long will touch screens remain fashionable?

One physical machine format that was very popular a few years ago, the MP3 player, is getting out of fashion, slowly losing ground to smartphones and tablets. Since the last two devices can perfectly playback audio-video contents and come with memory size and storage capacity that exceed and by far that of the typical MP3 player, who then needs to carry a redundant, "old" piece of hardware?

With the Cloud (another fad?) even the ubiquitous USB flash drive may soon become extinct. Indeed, why should you carry one if you can always store data and files on the cloud and access them from any computer, tablet or smartphone, anytime, anywhere? I recently realised that since I started using cloud-based storage service last January I have not touched any of the five or six USB flash drives I keep at home and in my office.

I can think of a better way to illustrate the above than the quote that was published in the Wall Street Journal about IT guru and Oracle's boss Larry Ellison who said: "I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about ... It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

Tablets, blogs, cloud computing, social networks and other Internet-based habits are bound to pass one day or another, though they may return again after some changes are done. This is the circle of fashion -- and its futility.

© Jordan Times 2012