STAMFORD, CT — Parting is such sweet sorrow, and never more so than when the relationship has lasted a long, long time. After 40 years, the computer mouse’s hour upon the stage may be about to come to an end, according to one research firm.Gartner analyst Steve Prentice already is penning an elegy for the electronic rodent. The mouse, he said, may disappear within three to five years.
“The mouse works fine in the desktop environment, but for home entertainment or working on a notebook, it’s over,” he told BBC News.
He reached that conclusion by watching the eagerness with which consumers have embraced so-called “gestural computer mechanisms,” a broad category of devices that encompasses touch screens, fingerprint scanners, facial-recognition systems and mind-machine interfaces. Many of the products currently making waves for manufacturers were spawned by electronic gaming.
“You’ve got Panasonic showing forward-facing video in the home-entertainment environment,” Prentice told the BBC. “Instead of using a conventional remote control, you hold up your hand and it recognizes you have done that.
“It also recognises your face and that you are you, and it will display on your TV screen your menu. You can move your hand to move around and select what you want.”
Prentice added that Sony and Canon, among other manufacturers, have developed systems that recognize faces in real-time and even can deduce a person’s mood based on facial expression.
“You even have emotive systems where you can wear a headset and control a computer by simply thinking, and that’s a device set to hit the market in September,” Prentice told the BBC. “This is all about using computer power to do things smarter.”
Prentice pointed to the popularity of game systems like Nintendo’s Wii and Apple’s iPhone as an indication of the popularity of mouse-less computer interaction.
Understandably, mouse manufacturers are not entirely thrilled to hear their offspring’s days are numbered. In fact, some of them are deeply invested in denial.
“The death of the mouse is greatly exaggerated,” Rory Dooley, senior vice president and general manager of Logitech’s control devices unit, told the BBC. Logitech is the world’s largest mouse manufacturer, having sold more than 500 million of the critters in the past 20 years. “This [new wave in computer interfaces] just proves how important a device the mouse is.
“People have been talking about convergence for years,” he continued. “Today’s TV works as a computer, and today’s computer works as a TV. The devices we use have been modified for our changing lifestyles, but it doesn’t negate the value of the mouse.”
Dooley is convinced the 40th anniversary of the mouse, planned for later this year, will boost the device’s popularity. Besides, he noted, the majority of the world has yet to experience the internet, but eventually everyone will be connected — and many new converts will use mice.
“Bringing technology, education and information to [third-world countries] will be done by accessing Web browsers and doing that in the ways that we are familiar with today, and that is using a mouse,” Dooley told the BBC. “There are around one billion people online, but the world’s population is over five billion.”
Although Logitech hardly seems inclined to begin planning a funeral, the company might be well-advised at least to diversify. After all, historically the mouse hasn’t been exactly kind to its lovers. Dr. Douglas Engelbart invented the creature while working for the Stanford Research Institute. He never received a single dollar from his investment, because his patent expired in 1987 — well before the computer mouse became an indispensible peripheral.
The keyboard, though…that’s another matter, according to Prentice.
“For all its faults, the keyboard will remain the primary text input device,” he told the BBC. “Nothing is easily going to replace it. But the idea of a keyboard with a mouse as a control interface is the paradigm that I am talking about breaking down.”
