Introduction

Your car is the leading edge for computing platform independence. Hard to believe, but true.

It is ironic. Here at Tom’s we spend a lot of time telling you which computing platforms are the right choices for your applications, and how to extract that last bit of performance out of your systems.

But my thoughts today are that eventually, these choices aren’t so important. And in some areas, the platform choices are so indistinguishable that it is hard to tell. Take your car as an example. Does it matter which platform should be the source of your digital entertainment ? Should it be a full-fledged audio system, an iPod with a car connector, an in-seat DVD player, a real PC or a game console ? All of them are valid answers. All of them are being installed in cars across the planet by talented and not-so-talented people. All of them make sense, depending on the particular application suite that you are trying to deliver. And increasingly, all of these solutions will eventually be offered by the same set of companies and suppliers.

If you have a chance, take a look at our article from last week on this subject.

What I am trying to say is that the end result makes the platform choice less important. Certainly, the differences between a souped-up system with oodles of RAM and a $500 graphics card and a P90 with barely enough room to breathe are significant. But at the end of the day, we all run some kind of browser, some kind of IMAP email and RSS readers, open the same kind of documents and spreadsheets, and use some form of Instant Messaging. We have our digital music collection on some software that has ripped all of our CDs into MP3s. The rest is really irrelevant, whether it is on a Mac or Windows or Lindows or some embedded OS that we don’t even see like on a cell phone. Doesn’t really matter.

What are the two most successful uptakes in the platform business of the past several years ? CrackBerry and gaming consoles. You don’t hear people debating what kind of OS is running on their Nintendo, do you ? It doesn’t matter. They don’t care, just as long as those games are available. We have arrived with the ultimate Flat Computer.

You probably are sick and tired of hearing about how the Internet has flattened the world. How instantaneous communications has made it easier for outsourcing to India and China. And how email has flattened organizations since the CEO can hear directly from the lowliest file clerk. Yeah, been there. So last week.

But go beyond these truisms for a moment, with me, and think of what it means to live on a flat Earth and where other steps are being skipped in your daily work life. When was the last time it mattered that people worked together in the same physical space, coming in at 9 am and leaving at 5pm ? What does that mean anymore ?

Another example : LCD TVs. Does it really matter what display device we have, and what video stream drives it ? Nope. Do you care whether or not your TV is rear-projection, front-projection, 16x9, or have double-wide pixels ? Right now you do, because there are some big differences between all these choices. But soon you won’t care, because it will all be the same thing.

Look at Microsoft, as another example. They have moved into the gaming market, and soon their revenues from gaming platforms will be larger than divisions that produce IT productivity applications. As my boss Omid writes about in his column last week , "Imagine what would happen if Oracle suddenly got its own reality show on Fox, or SAP put on a Broadway musical, all to great acclaim." Now that would be a flattening to be reckoned with.

What this means to me is that I need to spend time not on choosing platforms or which applications matter, but how to show what you need to accomplish your job and your life with whatever tools you have at hand. That was an eye-opener for me.

If you want to read up more about the flat earth phenomenon, go out and buy this book by Thomas Friedman .

Friedman spent the past year traveling around the world and talking to a lot of different people before he got his epiphany about the flat earth. He spends a lot of time telling you about his insights into the various tectonic forces that we all have heard before, such as outsourcing, open sourcing, and in-sourcing. But his approach is fresh, interesting, and intriguing. His parents used to tell him when he was a boy (as did my own) "Finish your dinner. Children are starving in China and India." Today, he says, we should be telling our children "Finish your homework. Children are starving for your jobs in China and India." The difference is big. Any brief examination of the news will prove, as (to just take something that happened last week) the huge distributor Ingram Micro will be laying off hundreds of people in the LA area and moving those jobs overseas to cut costs. The world is flat. Deal with it, or the next job to leave might be your own.

David Strom

Editor-in-Chief
Tom’s Guides Publishing