Meanwhile, the landscape and applications of personal computing have changed quite a bit since any of the aforementioned systems were designed. Computers are no longer stationary objects; networks are no longer confined to businesses, government or educational institutions. The commercialization of the Internet through the World Wide Web, e-mail, chat, bulletin boards and instant messaging has produced a vast global network of interconnected machines that often speak the same language, albeit inefficiently, insecurely and with outdated user experiences. Many core problems remain unsolved, and the industry seems stuck in a 10 year-old funk with no clear innovative leader while Apple and Microsoft iteratively, minimally and expensively improve upon or slightly alter the appearance of Apple's original, outdated desktop user experience.
It is well-known that Microsoft has a research organization that is busy investigating and defining next-generation operating systems and user interfaces. Many of Microsoft's brightest thinkers and engineers defected from Apple, particularly the principal designers of the now-defunct Newton group, and many members of Apple's former advanced technology research group (ATG). While the Newton failed as a product line, the core concepts that comprise the foundation, storage, developer and user-level runtime layers of the Newton OS remain technologically superior and vastly ahead of anything widely available on today's desktop or portable computers. Sadly, poor Apple marketing and pricing, underpowered hardware and a rushed engineering schedules seemed to have tarnished the Newton name and doomed the project altogether. Jobs canned the project soon after his return to the helm of the company he begat and was later excommunicated from.
Wireless and broadband networking is finally starting to take off. Cellular phones and pagers are slowly but surely starting to resemble the PDA, a concept Apple coined and pioneered with Newton. Palm is starting to work on its next-generation Palm OS with the help of the recently-acquired Be engineering staff, and a small company called Danger Research appears to have a promising Java-based platform that relies on remote services to broker the relatively bandwidth and memory-intensive content on the Internet with its "Hiptop" devices, which have limited bandwidth and memory capacity. Microsoft's Windows CE and Pocket PC operating systems provide an uninspiring Windows-like user experience for portable devices, and surely other systems are in the works. There does not appear to be a clear leader, software-wise, in the wireless space. One would think that this is an area in which Apple, a purported pioneer, would want to take the lead; after all, Newton was Apple's defining entry into this space, an offering that has not been matched nor exceeded technologically since its inception.
