Following a link on a BBC News diabetes story today turns up the following interesting facts:
Diabetes websites too complicated
Online health advice for people with diabetes is often too complex to understand, analysis suggests.
... He found people would need a reading ability of an educated 11 to 17-year-old to understand the sites.
However, he said the average reading age of people in the UK was equivalent to an educated nine-year-old.
The Register documents it rather less subtly:
People still thick despite internet
The lamentable truth about the mind-expanding claims for the internet has finally been revealed - people do not use the bottomless well of knowledge to advance themselves, preferring instead to indulge in casual surfing related to hobbies and music.
This is the conclusion of a Cardiff University study which shows that the concept of online "lifelong learning" has largely fallen on deaf ears. The number of adults in education has hardly risen since the advent of the net and less than half of people over 18 make use of the wibbly wobby web - despite its widespread deployment in public buildings.
... Sadly, web utopians will just have to accept that the internet is ultimately no different to that previously-hailed great leveller: the printed word. As the old saying goes - you can lead a horse to the complete works of Shakespeare but you can't make it read.
One of the limits of current broadband penetration is the use of PCs in the home. Broadband is associated in the minds of the public with PC use. But just as Andrew Odlyzko has observed, when electricity was introduced, people would buy a motor which could then be attached to various devices. Nowadays there are motors in dozens of applicances in a typical home. The same will happen to connected applicances.
Expect to see two parallel trends emerge. One, also widely noted, is the emergence of the application-specific device. The iPod or TiVo are the standard examples. It does one thing extremely well. I have several highly educated friends who don't have PCs at home, or don't have them plugged into the Internet. There is a market to sell people broadband on the basis that a whole raft of information-centric applicances will hook in easily. Today broadband is marketed on features of no meaning or use to the end customer. Megabits? Asymmetric whatsits? Fugeddaboudit. Time to sell the benefits, not the features.
WiFi is likely to be the delivery mechanism for the "last plasterboard" scale. But WiFi today is horrendous as a consumer offering. How can any mass market technology succeed when you're expected to make decisions between WEP and WPA encryption, and dream up 64-digit hexadecimal security keys? If I was running Apple, I'd be looking to out-flank Microsoft by moving into home automation and bypass the PC roadblock. The Apple co-branded heating thermostat, Apple door security system, Apple smart clocks and pervasive computing devices. All seamlessly interoperating.
The second trend is a move away from textual displays. VoIP enables everyone to become their own radio talk-show host. Personalised call-in programs will be the RSS feed for the masses. Edward Tufte notwithstanding, for the semi-literate plebfolk, talk is how they get their daily data fix. Voice may be a terrible way of passing information (and a great way of interacting) compared to the written word, but that's no consolation if you can't read well. For the textual and graphic interfaces that remain, the most powerful brands may turn out to be those of tabloid newspapers. They understand how to interact with sub-literate but otherwise intelligent adults. So I hope Apple and Sony don't mind burying their upmarket positioning when they co-market with the Sun and Daily Mirror.
One irony of this shift is that Microsoft are spending billions of R&D dollars on their next-generation Windows, codenamed Longhorn. Having been the greatest creator of corporate wealth the world has ever seen, they are now engaged in a progam of capital destruction and waste of incomparable proportions. If Microsoft had already handed all its cash pile back to shareholders, do you thing they would find it easy to raise the money to build Longhorn? I suspect not. Longhorn does nothing to deepen the spread of connectivity to the masses. It will be an expensive disappointment.
The PC era is over. Time to reallocate your tech stock portfolio back to the consumer electronics companies.
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The End of the PC as we know it? from [ zeugma : blog ]
The thought-provoking Telepocalypse has happed across something which I find myself pondering of late: where is the PC going? I suspect we're about to hit a fork in the road. How much more gigahertz pushing will it take before consumers...
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