As the 2008 election cycle’s rhetoric approaches a feverish crescendo, I’m reminded of one politician’s axiom a few years ago, “It’s about the economy stupid.” No, no, this is not going to devolve into a senseless rant about our broken system of governance, but rather an examination of the sad state we find the PC industry languishing in. This post kicks off a series on the challenges facing personal computing and innovation stagnation.

Let’s recap, here we are a couple of decades into the PC Revolution, you know “information at your fingertips” and all that good stuff; and for the most part (in the developed nations on earth), the vision laid out by the Jobs’ and Gates’ of the world has been radically successful. Computers in every home, school and practically every pocket (if you count PDAs and smart phones); add in virtually ubiquitous internet access, and we can safely say the information age has come into its own.

But it is that very pervasive success that now threats innovation across the computing landscape. The large install base is now the industries’ greatest hindrance to technological advancement.

In no area of computing is this more true then the symbiotic relationship between PC Hardware and Software. Think about it, with hundreds of millions of X86 architecture systems out there, predominantly running some version of Windows, there is very little incentive for vendors to venture out in new directions. Rather month after month, year after year; it’s good enough for system/component manufactures and ISVs to offer minimal incremental improvements and call it a “Ground Breaking Must Have” upgrade.

And this vicious cycle feeds itself! But rather then a synergistic cycle that generates greater innovation and cutting edge solutions, this cycle is like a giant boulder rolling down hill squashing the objects it encounters on the way. As these peripheral objects (E. G. software applications, hardware devices, even new CPUs) are mashed into this massive PC collective “boulder”, the mass and diameter of the boulder expands exponentially.

Continuing with the metaphor, the inertia of this boulder has become unstoppable. The boulder is now very big and its moving fast, after all it has been building momentum for a many years now. As the PC boulder careens downhill (think of the hill as the a measure of time), it can easily squash new innovations that are viewed as too cutting edge, or outside the mainstream.

In my next post on the subject, I’ll expand on this problem as well look at the Software side of the business and how it’s failing.