The installed base of personal computers in U.S. homes is still around 30 percent, which is far lower than for any other consumer-electronics device such as TV, VCR, or telephone. A chief barrier to more widespread adoption of the PC in the home is a common feeling among consumers that PCs are difficult to learn, use, and maintain. In addition, many people worry about the perceived short lifetime of a computer and its essential obsolescence within a few years.
To more deeply penetrate the consumer market, the combined elements of the PC design must make it possible for novice users to easily carry out key tasks without experience, including:
Research with end users has revealed these areas that call for design attention to broaden the consumer PC market:
Form-factor issues for such design include size, color, and convenience of connections, switches, and so on. Designing a PC that contains no user-serviceable parts has strong appeal for consumer markets.
The USB and IEEE 1394 external bus architectures will play a key role in many of the ease-of-use scenarios, such as the ability to hot plug any device without rebooting the PC.
Key elements of the OnNow initiative serve this design area. The user should be able to expect the PC to perform as instantly as other electronic devices such as VCR or TV, while also expecting the PC to not introduce extra noise into the home environment.
This means, for example, supporting video display on large monitors with better quality video definition than provided by the TV, or providing PC-controlled audio output at a quality equivalent to home stereos.
The PC should be able to control and integrate operation of any standalone device in the home that produces or manipulates information, including the TV, stereo, VCR, CD player, DVD, laser disc, digital satellite services, game console, and so on.
The Simply Interactive Personal Computer (SIPC) initiative at Microsoft is a vision and framework of technologies devised to advance the PC platform by identifying core improvements required to dramatically enhance the level of usability and functionality of both Windows 95 and Windows NT family of operating systems, and PC hardware.
SIPC is not a PC design and the PC 97 guidelines should not be seen as definitions of an SIPC design. The results of the SIPC initiative — both hardware and software — will apply to all categories of systems, including entertainment PCs, mobile PCs, business PCs, workstations, and servers. There is no particular "SIPC" system design, rather just SIPC "focused" hardware technologies, system features, and software designs.
The SIPC initiative can be expressed as a series of goals with specific deliverables associated with them that could apply to any PC hardware platform, form factor, or category of PC platform. SIPC goals also apply to both operating systems, with a high priority at Microsoft to bring the same feature support and functionality to both Windows NT and Window 95.
A good example of a SIPC technology would be OnNow, designed to bring a scaleable set of power management and control features to both PC hardware and the operating system, regardless of the form factor, market category, or platform.
The following diagram represents the technologies that SIPC covers. How they are applied to a market category or form factor is based on the market demands for the product line.
SIPC technologies and PC market categories
(Drawing is representational only and is not to scale.)
For PC 97 and SIPC, the term "sealed case PC" is intended to drive the ease of use concept to a new level for the PC platform. Today we have sealed case PCs in the form of mobile and laptop computers. These systems are self contained and provide features to make it exceedingly easy to add and remove components, including memory upgrades, without the end user having to open the PC and partially disassemble boards and cables to add a device to the system.
This concept must be applied in a much broader way to allow the same ease of use for any system form factor. These ideas — that the PC contains "no user serviceable parts" inside, that PCs can be upgraded easily by anyone, and that a sealed-case PC is expandable — are not mutually exclusive, unattainable goals.
The sealed-case PC fits into the SIPC framework of technologies including USB, IEEE 1394, and modular RAM and CPU upgrade. However, Microsoft does not expect that all SIPC designs will be actually "sealed," even when they do support these expansion methods.