People’s needs are changing. In the past we had the techies (the original inspirations for the ‘geek’ image of avne and glasses) who wanted to see ‘cool’ things and read about fibre interconnects, bus speeds and transfendibulator silicon overlaid frottling pipes. Next to these guys we had the standard non-techie type. Considered by the ‘geek’ to be as dumb as a housebrick these people weren’t at all technical, they just wanted a PC – they didn’t want to know how or why it did what it did, they just wanted one.

Times change and today’s consumer is now technically aware, the ‘geek’ and the housebrick have interbred to produce a techinically aware offspring. They might be more aware of the technical stuff, and even able to tell you what Moore’s Law is but still, they don’t mind what’s inside their latest gadget as long as it works. For example, take your mobile phone; most of you wont know what graphics chip or processor is in there all you care about is it allows you to make calls and send messages… and perhaps take photos of the bird you pulled to send to your married mate, but who cares what’s in there as long as it does what its supposed to?

Now all this has a point, and it’s this; I no longer need to worry about the technology driving my system – I need something more, I need a solution. For example do I need to worry myself about how the new Texas Instrument based WiFi cards I have started using work? Do I really give a stuff about all those little electronics bits inside the card? Or should I care more about the fact they provide internet access to all my systems and a 54Mbps internal network? I think that nowadays the enthusiast is too often loosing sight of what really matters and what really matters is the function of their latest graphics card, or processor… It’s what they do, not how they do it that matters.

Don’t believe me? Ok, stroll into your living room, go on, take this mag in there and look around. Right, see the TV? Ok, now get a bit of paper and write down exactly how much you know about it. Beyond the make, model, colour and size, how much do you really know about it? Ok, you might know all about the feature set and how to set up surround sound, but do you have any idea how the telly actually does that? The fact is, you don’t care about the innards of your telly and how they work just as long as you get a nice picture and sound out of it. How about another example in your living room, that magic box that is Sky+? Consumers don’t care that it has a xGB hard drive in it, what they care about is the fact they can pause and watch their live television, meaning they never miss anything should they have to leave the goggle box for a few moments or if the missus starts hovering in the middle of the football. Another example of a popular technical gadget is Apple, no one cares what spec their mate’s IPod is, the name IPod gives an instant representation of the product.

Everyone wants to break into this consumer electronics market. However, the reason why Sony, Phillips, and the other big players are not worried yet is simply because this market is driven by solutions not technology. What the big blue chip companies should be concerned about is the attack from the CE products on to the PC market.

The entire digital home concept is something which screams with issues to me. One minute we have people telling us we should put a PC in our living room, when what they should be marketing to us is a solution. This solution should be tailored towards the enthusiast, since we are the early adopters and if they can’t sell it to us then what chance do they have in pushing it to the masses? Anyone can simply put a PC in their living room – not everyone can create the software to interact with the hardware. And the hardware needs to be quiet but still perform well to meet all my media needs, I don’t want something sounding like a Hoover sitting next to my telly playing back stuttering video and crashing every half hour.

In short, PC manufacturers should take a leaf out of the CE guys’ handbook and come up with a solution that works out of the box, does what I expect and need it to and do all of this with the absolute minimum of interaction from me. The first person to come up with something like that might just give Bill Gates’ fortune a run for its money.