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This assumes the future needs a docking station. Which assumes a keyboard and mouse are still the tools interaction. I won't concede that they are. People in o

This assumes the future needs a docking station. Which assumes a keyboard and mouse are still the tools interaction. I won't concede that they are. People in our business are a bit myopic because you HAVE to have a keyboard to code; that may not be true for everyone else. Granted that is what we are used to, but rewind a decade and no one was talking about playing games without a handheld controller.

graue 14y ago
johngalt didn't mention a mouse, you did. I think when we get larger touchscreens the mouse may indeed become obsolete. (I'm looking forward to it; I never had any love for that form of input.) But a keyboard will continue to be useful for anyone who has to write more than 2 paragraphs in a sitting. That's most office workers. Also, a reporter, marketer, investor or designer (to name a few example non-code jobs) can hardly do their work on a 3 to 4 inch screen.
- jackalope 14y ago
  Voice recognition and predictive text have progressed very well. Despite the challenges posed by group settings, there are plenty of people who would turn to dictation if it freed them from the tyranny of the keyboard ("You want me to type 2 paragraphs? By hand?").
- zem 14y ago
  moving from mouse to touchscreen will also require moving from vertical to plane-of-the-desk displays. it's simply not ergonomic to keep touching a screen oriented the way desktop and laptop monitors are today.
  - graue 14y ago
    Good point. Because of the bad ergonomics I hedged my bet and only said the mouse "may" become obsolete, but it didn't occur to me that full-size displays could sit flat (or very shallowly inclined?) on a desk.
theorique 14y ago
I assume you mean "our business" = tech, programming, web, etc. but lots more people in nearly all businesses write a lot of text in the course of their day. For example, marketing, communications, senior executives in almost every industry, sales ... these people write a lot of text in email or document form every day.
- cdwhite 14y ago
  One can imagine them dictating, if speech recognition software is sufficiently good. This doesn't work for code (or, perhaps, it doesn't work for the programming languages we have now---a programming language with syntax designed to be spoken, not typed, would be very interesting) and it seems it doesn't work for writing fiction, as I think I recall Charlie Stross discovering (can't find the blog posts now, though http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/a-writing-experiment-i-plan-to.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/a-writin... discusses the problem). For day-to-day communication, though, the stylistic differences between dictated and typed prose are probably not important. Moreover, this might yield a small efficiency win over both text communication as is (email, IM) and the telephone: dictated text would be as fast to produce as spoken communication (I can talk much faster than I can type, and I get the feeling that's true in general), while remaining as fast to read and as easy to edit as text. I'm not sure this win would be very big, though; for me, at least, the bulk of the time I spend on writing is spent figuring out how to phrase things. Jackalope's comment, though, indicates that people are starting to see noticeable improvements in efficiency---the "how did I ever live without this" feeling. Perhaps they find speech more natural than typing, and spend less time agonizing over how to express themselves? This scenario depresses me somewhat, as I have an inordinate and perhaps irrational fondness for slower, more considered forms of expression. I find my prose is more dense and pointed when I hand-write than when I type, which I prefer (though my superabundant laziness combined with the ease of editing on a computer mean that I almost always type).
  - EwanG 14y ago
    Ummm... no. I am not going to dictate a spreadsheet worth of data even if the voice recognition were 100% (which it's not). I'm not going to try to dictate an IM in the middle of a meeting. I'm not going to dictate anything within listening distance of my boss or a customer that might be less than complementary. And so on... I think when we get fMRI sensors that fit on our head and we can "think" a sheet that's a possibility. But I see no business situation where voice beats typing when I have both available to me.

graue 14y ago

johngalt didn't mention a mouse, you did. I think when we get larger touchscreens the mouse may indeed become obsolete. (I'm looking forward to it; I never had any love for that form of input.) But a keyboard will continue to be useful for anyone who has to write more than 2 paragraphs in a sitting. That's most office workers. Also, a reporter, marketer, investor or designer (to name a few example non-code jobs) can hardly do their work on a 3 to 4 inch screen.

jackalope 14y ago
Voice recognition and predictive text have progressed very well. Despite the challenges posed by group settings, there are plenty of people who would turn to dictation if it freed them from the tyranny of the keyboard ("You want me to type 2 paragraphs? By hand?").
zem 14y ago
moving from mouse to touchscreen will also require moving from vertical to plane-of-the-desk displays. it's simply not ergonomic to keep touching a screen oriented the way desktop and laptop monitors are today.
- graue 14y ago
  Good point. Because of the bad ergonomics I hedged my bet and only said the mouse "may" become obsolete, but it didn't occur to me that full-size displays could sit flat (or very shallowly inclined?) on a desk.

theorique 14y ago

I assume you mean "our business" = tech, programming, web, etc. but lots more people in nearly all businesses write a lot of text in the course of their day. For example, marketing, communications, senior executives in almost every industry, sales ... these people write a lot of text in email or document form every day.

cdwhite 14y ago
One can imagine them dictating, if speech recognition software is sufficiently good. This doesn't work for code (or, perhaps, it doesn't work for the programming languages we have now---a programming language with syntax designed to be spoken, not typed, would be very interesting) and it seems it doesn't work for writing fiction, as I think I recall Charlie Stross discovering (can't find the blog posts now, though http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/a-writing-experiment-i-plan-to.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/03/a-writin... discusses the problem). For day-to-day communication, though, the stylistic differences between dictated and typed prose are probably not important. Moreover, this might yield a small efficiency win over both text communication as is (email, IM) and the telephone: dictated text would be as fast to produce as spoken communication (I can talk much faster than I can type, and I get the feeling that's true in general), while remaining as fast to read and as easy to edit as text. I'm not sure this win would be very big, though; for me, at least, the bulk of the time I spend on writing is spent figuring out how to phrase things. Jackalope's comment, though, indicates that people are starting to see noticeable improvements in efficiency---the "how did I ever live without this" feeling. Perhaps they find speech more natural than typing, and spend less time agonizing over how to express themselves? This scenario depresses me somewhat, as I have an inordinate and perhaps irrational fondness for slower, more considered forms of expression. I find my prose is more dense and pointed when I hand-write than when I type, which I prefer (though my superabundant laziness combined with the ease of editing on a computer mean that I almost always type).
- EwanG 14y ago
  Ummm... no. I am not going to dictate a spreadsheet worth of data even if the voice recognition were 100% (which it's not). I'm not going to try to dictate an IM in the middle of a meeting. I'm not going to dictate anything within listening distance of my boss or a customer that might be less than complementary. And so on... I think when we get fMRI sensors that fit on our head and we can "think" a sheet that's a possibility. But I see no business situation where voice beats typing when I have both available to me.