Gallery

Portable Business

Posted on 5 Jun 2002 at 14:57

PDAs used to be little more than electronic diaries, but with the addition of wireless networking technology a revolution is brewing, argues Paul Lynch

Changes in technology have always meant changes in business. But very often the radical change has been triggered by what might otherwise seem to be a minor detail in technology. The whole Renaissance and Industrial Revolution are a history of these curious blips on the radar. Take Arkwright's Spinning Jenny, or the cotton gin - both are simple devices that heralded a complete turnaround in agricultural and industrial lifestyles. Or consider the impact of the discovery of the applications for penicillin, the curious properties of doped semiconductors or, for that matter, the first commercial computers after World War II.

In many ways, compared to the impact of the first massive computers, the changes brought about by the introduction of PCs, although a relatively big technological change, seem like a baby's cautious first few steps. The continuation of this trend of miniaturisation to create truly portable computers - first laptops, then PDAs and now pocket computers and integrated smart phones - looks to have had the same revolutionary impact as the cotton gin. These new technologies aren't just new computer devices. Instead they're enablers for new ways of carrying out business. The new portables can execute commercial transactions when remote from the central brains of the business. They give you the freedom to act as an independent agent of the corporation in a way that has never been possible ever before.

Terminal tendency

In the 'good old days', themselves barely 20 years ago, the only way to interact with the company business systems was either to use a fixed terminal, or to exchange letters, telexes and phone calls with someone who had access to such a system (faxes had yet to arrive on the scene). A few intrepid pioneers had 'portable' terminals - I use the word very loosely - which were teletypes (like electronic typewriters), with acoustic coupler modems. Getting adequate phone-line quality to interact reliably, even at 300 baud, was an impossible and frustrating challenge. The nature of these systems, and the largely mainframe-based computing of the time, meant that only a semi-permanent remote office was an option. In practice, although computer power was used to speed up what used to be called paperwork, the enterprise was still driven by reams of paper rushed from place to place by fleets of trucks.

In the early 1980s Psion caused a new wave by releasing its Organiser, and then the Organiser II. As the early Psions looked rather more like pencil cases than PDAs, to use one you had to be remarkably dedicated. With a massive 64Kb of memory in the LZ64, they had the power of a desktop computer of only a couple of years before, although the four-line LCD panel is typical of the compromise necessary, even now, for portable computer usage. The Organiser II had a lot of the Hewlett-Packard programmable calculator in its heritage. It has survived remarkably well, beating other products of its generation - it was still in production until earlier this year.

What we now call PDAs were in themselves little more than electronic replicas of the Filofax, that curious binder so beloved of vicars from decades past, with address book, diary and notepads all collated together. Again, like the spreadsheet, the revolution was a paper one predating the more popular electronic device by many years. It's the combination of PDAs with rapid synchronisation to desktop and network-based organisers that has made them more useful than the Filofax. However, none of these devices were capable of more than a small, general lightening of the load of a business; none of them have been capable of network operation in any form that could impact business processes. The software applications in use were no more than software recreations of paper and desktop tools, like the notepad, diary, calculator (yes, there used to be mechanical calculators) and spreadsheet.