American - Journalist | March 27, 1947 -
I was an early user of AOL - so early, I didn't even have a number after my user name. For me, email was once vital, both for personal and business uses.
Walt Mossberg
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There are lots of reasons email persists, even as faster and simpler forms of communication proliferate and your personal communications likely have mostly migrated elsewhere. But one big one is that new types of media channels rarely totally kill off old ones, even though everyone predicts they will.
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It's often hard to remember that the personal computing era is still quite young. It only dates from 1977, with the arrival of the first mass-market PCs.
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For many years, even as users became more sophisticated, personal computers took too much effort to use without problem-solving, keeping alive the yearning for greater simplicity. Microsoft's dominant Windows platform, in particular, was a home for all manner of bugs and problems that required IT people to straighten out.
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In 2007, everything changed with the iPhone. As crippled as that first model now seems, with its lack of apps and glacial cellular connectivity, the iPhone was a practical, useful, self-contained computer a child could understand. It was an information appliance.
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By the 2010s, almost everybody in the developed world, it seemed, had a powerful digital device that took little or no special skills or training to use.
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A great laptop running the new kinds of user interfaces and apps that people now love on phones and tablets would be a big, exciting event that would help seal the deal. But there hasn't yet been a product that emphatically suggests the era of the traditional PC is fading.
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Open-minded tech tinkerers may still prefer traditional PCs for work because they allow much more customization than, say, an iPad.
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Amazon's 'Twitch' appears to be creating a service that operates like Twitter.
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Microsoft makes numerous apps for both Android and iOS, as do Google, Amazon and Facebook. You can run iTunes and iCloud on Windows and Office on the Mac.
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Ultimately, I don't think even a five-company platform oligopoly is good for consumer tech. By its very nature, it handicaps independent companies with new ideas. But it will end one day. I just don't know when.
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If Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or somebody else can ever blast away all the ridiculous vestiges of decades-old TV content and technology we live with today, I'll buy whatever they come up with. Until then, I'm settling for a Caavo.
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