December 9, 1990

A FUNNY thing happened at the Personal Computer Outlook Forum last week. This annual conference, sponsored by Technologic Partners and Merrill Lynch, is usually pretty staid, and this year’s agenda was the latest in buzzwords — networking, desktop and cooperative computing, blah blah blah.

However there was an interesting wrinkle in business as usual, a panel called “The Next Waves: What future products will attract large numbers of new customers?”

One would suspect that the panelists — John Warnock, chairman of Adobe Systems (inventors of PostScript), Yogen Dalal, VP of product development for Claris (Apple’s software subsidiary), Jim Clark, chairman of Silicon Graphics, and John Moussouris, co-founder of MIPS and now chairman of startup MicroUnity Systems — would have been prognosticating the “Lotus 1-2-3 of the 1990s,” as the ragged cliche goes.

Nope. Ready for a flashback to the ’70s? The next wave, they say, is computer-based home entertainment.

Clark, visionary on one front already with the success of SGI’s Iris 3D workstation, says what he calls “visual computing” will inspire a whole new class of entertainment products and users.

Moussouris says computer-based digital TV is “inevitable,” and its permutations will appeal to the “ultimate consumer,” the couch potato. Dalal says the next wave will make computers “very” personal, citing examples of consumer products such as Kodak’s PhotoCD (which allows you to view your photo album from a CD onto your TV screen) and Sony’s DataDiskman, a personal CD-ROM drive and screen that’s only slightly bigger than a regular Diskman.

Though it’s basically hopeless that U.S. computer makers will get on the ball and make some competitive hardware in this market (except as development systems), many believe we will continue to make our mark in software, or content, to run on these machines, which are likely to range from DataDiskmans to CD-I (Compact Disk Interactive) players to “multimedia computers” to interactive, digital TV.

But each has a different screen size and color palette. Each handles sound differently and has a different operating system. Software developers have to tweak or rewrite every new title for every machine they want to target.

Big firms can invest that kind of time and money, but small firms — where creativity and innovation run deep — need to get in there, do the job, and get out. The more titles such companies can create, the faster the market will grow. How exciting would CD sound be if there were only 20 discs at Tower Records to choose from?

What’s required are “platform independent” tools to create the stuff, and strangely enough, just this week I found two firms striving to find them. One is Tiger Media, based in Los Angeles; the other is called Xenolith, based in Berkeley and run by Kimberly Disney of, yes, “the” Disney family.

Laura Buddine, president of Tiger Media, says her firm really just wants to make titles, but it had to build its own tools (running on Sun Sparcstations) because no one else had. “Platform independence is critical to profit,” she says. “The most important thing is to figure out what the consumer wants, not what hardware or software to use.”

And Disney, whose team just had to write an operating system to finish a product and who’s been looking at the Next workstation as a game development machine, says the machine’s price and performance is promising, but Xenolith’s ideal would go a step further than the usual “what you see is what you get,” to “what you see is what the real world (not just the Next world) is capable of displaying.”

So the upshot is this: if the U.S. doesn’t want to screw up its chance to hit the entertainment jackpot, it had better find a way to make all its stuff work together. None of the PC Outlook panelists mentioned a platform-independent authoring tool as a jump-start for home entertainment programs, but whoever creates that little product is going to be rich, and will probably make a lot of other people rich in the process.