InformationWeek

January 22, 2001

Your Digital Lifestyle

There's been a lot of speculation surrounding "Ginger," the mysterious product under development in a New England laboratory and planned for a 2002 release. No less a futurist than Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying that communities will spring up around Ginger, rumored to be a roving, motor-powered chair.

Woe to the exec who violates the mute button on that NDA form!

Well, I'm here to solve this riddle for you, friends. And we can dispense with nondisclosure forms. For I have seen the future and � it's a Web-surfing Barcalounger. Yes, friends, I have been working for several minutes now to jerry-rig my Dell Inspire (product placement: you owe me a hat, Michael) into my recliner, which I have dubbed "embark." I'm also doing a trademark search under the name "Baronet".

Sure, it's a brilliant, life-changing idea, but is it a good value? Look at it this way: The gas money and bridge tokens you save by never leaving your chair will pay for this gizmo in maybe four or five years, tops.

As Jobs has intuited, communities could spring up around this invention. But I see no reason to move anywhere, especially to set up a digital community. The home office is the beating heart of the utopian digital lifestyle (UDL).

Why go out? Free of unnecessary face-to-face interaction with the rest of humanity, we digital Bohemians are able to roam the Internet virtually at will, night or day, weekends and holidays, without ever having to step beyond the mailbox. In most towns, groceries can be delivered; dinner, too. Like you're going to miss a grocery store or a library? Pretty much everything else you need is available on the Web, too. Besides, everyone knows that stay-at-home workers catch fewer hacking coughs in the winter, reason enough to hermetically seal in your family.

I've been on the bleeding edge of this utopian digital lifestyle for so long now that car leasing is finally economical. What really changes for digital Bohemians is that fewer friends drop in unannounced (or otherwise), a critical part of the UDL productivity enhancement. You can work longer hours, with fewer distractions, at just the same pay! Once you let go of such Old World conventions as pre-UDL friends and family, you're able to unshackle yourself from the bonds of social discourse, such as poker games or dinner parties, or even play dates for your Internet-savvy children. Miss your friends? There's always Instant Messenger and, if it can wait, E-mail.

Now it's true that Microsoft has recently announced a partnership with La-Z-Boy to create a much higher-priced product that does something similar to my Baronet invention. But there's really no comparison here. Consider that my recliner has rolling casters, which means you can take in out back in the spring and summer. That option is probably several years away for Microsoft's Dewey WebBot Plus Recliner. Also, my lounger is an open system: You can run any Internet service provider you please with it, even Microsoft Network. Plus, my recliner can hold several handheld devices at a time, including a pen and paper.

What's Microsoft's contribution to the digital future? A wireless keyboard. On the other hand, La-Z-Boy is really getting serious about this: they've got chairs that will massage you while you both surf the Net and take phone calls. Undoubtedly, hard-core digital utopianists will eschew such bourgeois fluff.

If this product is successful I may rush out a workgroup-enabled device that Web-enables a couch. On second thought, consider yourself nondisclosed. Just don't tell Bill or La-Z-Boy what you've read about my inventions. But if you should decide to break this voluntary NDA, be sure to respect my pending trademarks.

Rusty Weston, editor of InformationWeek Research and InformationWeek.com, is a former card-carrying member of the American Statistical Association.

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